Another had a flat tire but was already awaiting a roadside assistance service.
A third belonged to a college student who claimed the officer refused to let her father arrive with a replacement tire.
The auditors did not treat every allegation as established fact.
They sought available recordings, photographs, dispatch logs, and witness accounts.
Then they discovered a troubling pattern.
A significant portion of the disputed tows involved the same small group of officers.
The sergeant who had shoved the commissioner was one of them.
The investigators also found that dispatchers sometimes received towing requests before officers had completed the necessary documentation.
In some cases, the same recovery company arrived unusually quickly.
That raised questions about whether the operator had received advance notice.
The audit team examined records from the private company.
Those records revealed that Pine Valley Recovery used a separate scheduling system to manage trucks, drivers, and storage facilities.
Certain dispatch requests had been entered into the company's system before the corresponding police request appeared in the county records.
That could result from legitimate coordination delays.
But the pattern required closer scrutiny.
Then a former dispatcher contacted the review team.
She was forty-four years old, a single mother of two teenagers, and had worked for the county for nearly twelve years.
She'd resigned six months earlier.
At the time, she told colleagues she wanted a less stressful job.
Now she explained that the stress had come from something specific.
She'd repeatedly questioned towing requests that didn't match the information available in dispatch.
Supervisors told her not to interfere.
One captain said experienced patrol officers knew when a vehicle needed removal.
Another instructed her to assign Pine Valley Recovery whenever the sergeant requested it, regardless of the usual rotation.
The dispatcher began keeping copies of her own scheduling notes.
Not confidential material taken for personal use.
Ordinary work records she was authorized to access and had documented while trying to resolve discrepancies.
When she raised concerns through her department, she was told to stop questioning field personnel.
Eventually, she resigned.
Now, after watching the commissioner pushed into the mud, she decided the information should be examined.
The independent auditors interviewed her.
They requested the original county records.
And they compared her notes with the dispatch database.
Several inconsistencies were confirmed.
More importantly, the review found that certain supervisory decisions had systematically bypassed the rotation policy.