Fatal error: Call to a member function fetch_assoc() on a non-object

That’s because there was an error in your query. MySQli->query() will return false on error. Change it to something like::

$result = $this->database->query($query);
if (!$result) {
    throw new Exception("Database Error [{$this->database->errno}] {$this->database->error}");
}

That should throw an exception if there’s an error…