Ali Ali Ali Ali was a habitual man.
The 24-year-old UTC student was new to Chattanooga, and his social circle was small. He didn't have a job.
After he went missing on Jan. 5, investigators checked Ali's bank records, talked with his roommates and his friends. They checked phone records and places he went, mostly just back and forth between UTC and his apartment.
"We used every available resource," said police Investigator Samansela Blount.
But there were only so many places to check.
Fourteen days went by without any answers. Then early Sunday morning campers found Ali dead on Maclellan Island, a half-mile-long swath of land tucked in the Tennessee River right in the middle of Chattanooga's downtown.
The discovery is agony for those who knew him.
"He was normal on the last day [he was seen]," said Walied Hassan, Ali's roommate. "He was really, literally normal. I mean we were laughing, we were just having a good time. I badly need to know what happened."
Police couldn't immediately determine how or when Ali died, but said there were no signs of foul play. Investigators will rely on the Hamilton County medical examiner to determine how Ali died while they try to piece together how he ended up on the island, which partially runs under Veterans Bridge.
Ali came here from Sudan in August to pursue his master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After applying for an assistantship on Jan. 5, he vanished.
Shortly after the search for Ali started, his brother, Hassan Elnour, said he was frustrated with how police handled the case, particularly a request to locate Ali's iPad.
Elnour said Apple employees refused to give him the information without going through police, and that it took several hours to get police to submit the necessary paperwork. Once the paperwork was submitted -- on the second full day Ali had been missing -- Apple initially denied the request.
Blount said police resubmitted that request on Jan. 8 and did obtain the data from Apple. However, Apple is unable to provide the GPS location on specific devices or activate the "Finding My iPhone" feature at the request of law enforcement, according to company documents.
Finding My iPhone is a feature that allows users to locate a misplaced device and make certain actions, like wiping all data from it, according to Apple. But it must be enabled by the user before the device goes missing.
Instead, the company was able to give Blount access to Ali's iCloud account, which often includes data like photos, documents and music -- but that still did not help police find Ali.
"It didn't show any new data," Blount said. "I even worked with the FBI and they got data we couldn't access. They did stuff I couldn't do, but we both got the same result."
It's not clear yet how that 24-hour delay affected Ali's chances of being found alive.
During the first six months of 2014, Apple received 4,132 requests from U.S. law enforcement for information on 13,743 devices, according to the company's Report on Government Information Requests.
And in that same time frame, the company also received 789 requests for iCloud account data, according to Apple.
"We consider these requests very carefully and only provide account content when the legal request is a search warrant," the Apple report read.
Elnour did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Hassan said he wants to wait to discuss Ali's death until after the medical examiner determines how he died.
He added that Ali was a straight-A student who seemed happy with life in Chattanooga.
"He was a funny guy," he said. "He always laughed. He always smiled. I've never seen him mad at anyone."
Contact staff writer Shelly Bradbury at 423-757-6525 or sbradbury@timesfreepress.com with tips or story ideas.