OAKLAND — It was early Saturday afternoon, and Curtis Mixon was talking with his 26-year-old nephew. Lovelle Shawn Mixon had called on a cellphone from his newly purchased 1995 Buick as he drove through east Oakland.
"Vel said the police was pulling him over," the 38-year-old medical records clerk recalled Sunday. "He said, 'I just pulled over.' "
The uncle listened as his nephew -- stopped on MacArthur Boulevard less than two blocks from a police station and around the corner from his sister's apartment -- spoke with a motorcycle officer and searched for his driver's license and registration.
Mixon told his uncle he would have to call him back.
He never did.
What followed was an almost inexplicable chain of events that left Mixon and four Oakland police officers dead and sent this city into an all-too-familiar ritual of municipal grief and self-examination.
According to authorities and witnesses, Mixon opened fire as two motorcycle officers stood behind his car, apparently checking his papers. He had been released from prison in November and was wanted for an alleged parole violation.
Sgt. Mark Dunakin, 40, died despite a citizen's efforts to revive him.
Officer John Hege, 41, was taken to Highland Hospital, where he was declared brain-dead Sunday.
While police swarmed the neighborhood, Mixon escaped around the corner to 74th Avenue in a residential neighborhood of bungalows, many with pit bulls fenced in the front yard. He shook on the locked back door of one house, startling the young girl inside, and then ducked into the ground floor of his sister Enjoli Mixon's apartment building.
Inside the apartment, another sister, 16-year-old Reynete Mixon, was unaware that her brother had returned. In an interview, she said she was in the bathroom when a SWAT team kicked down the door after a two-hour manhunt.
"I was yelling at them that I was in the house," Reynete said Sunday afternoon in front of her grandmother's modest Oakland home not far from where the shootings occurred. "They didn't really try to figure out who I was or if there was someone inside the house."
Across the hall, neighbor Mya Moore heard a crash on a door and a young girl shout, "Stop, wait!" Then came an explosion and rapid bursts of gunfire.
Peeking through her front window, the 27-year-old Oakland native saw one police officer, his head split open by gunfire, being dragged by officers through the building's main door to the sidewalk. Another was carried out to a police SUV and rushed away.
