That history began arriving in boxes.
Mallerie had been a Westbridge officer for 11 years. During that time, citizens had filed 14 complaints naming him. Nine involved Black residents. Five alleged unnecessary force. Three described him using nearly identical language: furtive movement, aggressive posture, or failure to obey clear verbal commands.
Only one complaint had been sustained, and that was for failing to activate his body camera during a traffic stop. The discipline had been a written warning.
Two years earlier, Mallerie had stopped 17-year-old Darius Bell outside a convenience store. Mallerie reported that Darius matched the description of a burglary suspect and reached toward his waistband. Darius said he had been pulling out his school identification.
During the detention, Mallerie twisted the teenager's arm behind his back until the shoulder dislocated.
No burglary had occurred in that neighborhood. The suspect description cited in Mallerie's report came from an incident 3 miles away and mentioned an adult wearing a red jacket. Darius was a teenager in a gray school uniform.
The department cleared Mallerie after an internal investigation lasting 12 days. The city later paid Darius's family $180,000.
The settlement included a confidentiality clause that barred the family from discussing its terms, though it could not lawfully prevent them from reporting possible crimes or cooperating with investigators.
Local reporter Leela Monroe had covered the city council vote approving that payment. She remembered that the case file had been unusually thin.
On Friday afternoon, she called Simone.
"I know you are not handling the investigation," Leela said. "I am not asking for inside information. I want you to know this officer has been here before."
Simone recorded Leela's name and number, then immediately referred her to Agent Hammond.
"I can't discuss the case," Simone said. "But please preserve whatever you have in its original form."
Dana had brought cupcakes home for her grandson, but she could not remember putting them in the refrigerator. Her husband asked her to describe the intersection once, then suggested she write down the details.
She did, including the walking signal and the officer's refusal of medical help. She left blank the things she had not seen.
That restraint made her account stronger.
"There are other families," Leela replied. "I think the city made each one believe they were alone."
She was right.
By Saturday, Agent Hammond's team had identified six former complainants willing to be interviewed. They did not all describe identical encounters.
One had been stopped while walking home from a night shift. Another had been pulled from a car after questioning why Mallerie wanted to search it. A third was a college student whom Mallerie detained outside his own apartment building because a neighbor had reported a suspicious person near the mailboxes.
What the accounts shared was a sequence. Mallerie began with a minor or undefined suspicion. When the person asked for a reason, he treated the question as resistance. He escalated his commands until obedience became physically difficult. Then he described the confusion he had created as evidence of danger.
The pattern was not enough by itself to prove what had happened to Aaliyah, but it changed the questions investigators asked. They requested Mallerie's pedestrian stops and traffic stops from the previous five years.
Westbridge stored much of that information in separate systems, some modern and some badly outdated. Data analyst Priya Shaw spent two days cleaning duplicate records, matching incident numbers, and comparing Mallerie with officers assigned to the same districts and shifts.
The preliminary results were stark. Black residents made up a disproportionate share of the people Mallerie stopped, searched, or subjected to force compared with the surrounding district and the department's overall figures.
The numbers did not establish the reason for every individual stop. They did, however, give investigators a basis to examine how Mallerie's conduct had been supervised and reviewed.
At the same time, the FBI compared his written reports with the body-camera recordings that had been preserved. The differences were not limited to the encounter with Aaliyah.
In several earlier cases, reports described a person as reaching aggressively, while the footage showed the person moving an ordinary object or asking a question. In another, Mallerie wrote that a suspect had ignored repeated commands, although the audio contained only one command before physical contact began.