The first prior complaint that investigators examined belonged to a woman named Mariah Ellis. She was a nurse who worked the evening shift at a hospital outside town and drove home on roads that were usually empty after midnight. Six years earlier, Perkins had stopped her for a taillight violation, then asked why she was traveling through a neighborhood where she did not live. He searched her car after she repeatedly declined consent, and when he found nothing he told her she had wasted his time.
Mariah filed a complaint the next morning. She remembered doing it because she had finished a twelve-hour shift and spent another two hours at the sheriff's office explaining that she had not been threatening or disrespectful. She described Perkins's tone, his refusal to return her identification promptly, and his suggestion that she must be going somewhere she had no business visiting. Two weeks later, the complaint was marked closed, with no policy violation found.
She tried to ask what evidence had been considered. No one returned her first call, and the person who answered her second suggested that the matter was over. Mariah kept a copy of her complaint in a folder with medical bills, tax records, and her mother's birth certificate. She did not expect anyone to read it again. When a state investigator called after the Warrenton ceremony, she initially thought the caller had the wrong number.
"You want to talk about the stop from six years ago?" she asked. "I was told there was nothing to talk about."
The investigator explained that the review was broader than the incident involving Grace and asked whether Mariah still had supporting records. She did, including a photograph of her car with the taillight functioning and a message she had sent her husband immediately afterward. Neither item proved every claim she had made, but both fixed the date and established details the original investigation had never checked. Mariah agreed to an interview because she wanted the record to show that she had not simply imagined what happened to her.
The second complaint came from Andre Bell, a Black Army veteran who ran a small landscaping company and drove a work truck with a trailer. Perkins stopped him near a subdivision entrance after a resident reported seeing a vehicle driving slowly through the area. Andre explained that he was looking for a client's house, showed the work order on his phone, and offered to call the homeowner. Perkins refused to make the call and accused him of using the landscaping business as a cover to survey expensive properties.
Andre was held at the roadside long enough to miss the appointment. His customer eventually called the sheriff's office to ask why a contractor she had hired had been detained. The deputy released him without a citation, but Andre lost the job because the homeowner's husband considered him too much trouble. He complained, then received the same four-word dismissal Mariah had received. He stopped pursuing the matter after a lawyer warned him that challenging the sheriff's office might cost more than the lost work.