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Four Oakland police officers were killed on March 21, 2009, in two East Oakland shootings about two hours apart, the department's deadliest day and California law enforcement's worst loss in nearly four decades, and the gunman, 26-year-old parolee Lovelle Mixon, was shot to death by officers.

The first shooting began as a traffic stop shortly after 1 p.m. on MacArthur Boulevard. Motorcycle Sgt. Mark Dunakin, 40, called in the license plate and driver's license for a records check and was told by radio that there was no record on file for the license, an independent review found. As Dunakin and Officer John Hege, 41, walked up together along the driver's door at 1:15 p.m., Mixon leaned out of the window and shot each of them twice, then climbed out and shot both again in the back as they lay in the street. Dunakin died at the scene. Hege, shot behind the left ear, was pronounced dead the next day after being kept on life support so his organs could be donated, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Neighbors gave first aid and called 911 before police units arrived. A citywide call for help brought more than 115 units from Oakland and outside agencies, but the review found the response outran anyone's control. No command post was established, no commander announced himself as incident commander, and three watch commanders split the work without coordinating. Ninety minutes passed before captains and deputy chiefs reached the scene.

A woman who recognized Mixon told a lieutenant she had seen him let into an apartment building on 74th Avenue, a block from the shooting, and a confidential informant separately gave the same address to another lieutenant. At 2:38 p.m., the lieutenant who had taken over the search decided a tracking dog minutes away could not be used until the apartment was entered and cleared, and ordered a team assembled from SWAT supervisors already on scene, a step the report said was contrary to department general orders.

Officers forced the door at 3:02 p.m. and threw stun grenades into a dark front room. Mixon, armed with an SKS rifle with a bayonet fixed to the barrel, fired through a bedroom wall and door. Sgt. Ervin Romans, 43, was mortally wounded, and Sgt. Pat Gonzales was shot through the left shoulder, with a second round glancing off his helmet. Sgt. Daniel Sakai, 35, was mortally wounded as he pushed into the bedroom. Gonzales, another officer and an Alameda County sheriff's deputy fired on Mixon, who was pronounced dead at 3:20 p.m.

Mixon was on parole and wanted on a no bail warrant for a parole violation. Investigators later said DNA tied him to the Feb. 5, 2009, rape of a 12-year-old girl in the same neighborhood, and that the department was notified of the genetic match the day before the traffic stop, the Chronicle reported. A state laboratory also matched him to the robbery and rape of two women, ages 21 and 23, about seven hours before he was pulled over. "It doesn't change what happened," Sgt. Dom Arotzarena, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, said of the findings. Thousands attended a public memorial service for the four officers at Oracle Arena on March 27.

The review was ordered by acting Chief Howard Jordan, carried out by a board of outside law enforcement experts and written by James K. Stewart of CNA's Institute for Public Research. Dated December 2009, it was made public on Jan. 6, 2010. The board found the motorcycle officers' approach did not comply with department training or contact and cover practice, commanders never set up a command post or applied basic incident management, a required notification to the communications supervisor was skipped and delayed the full SWAT callout by 45 minutes, and a photograph of Mixon was printed but never distributed to perimeter officers or the entry team. It said alternatives to forced entry, including telephone or public address contact and evacuating neighbors, were dismissed with little discussion, and that the entry team had never trained together as a unit. The same report found the officers' uses of force were within policy, the initial response was rapid and appropriate, and the entry team showed extraordinary discipline when a woman burst screaming out of the apartment and ran past them. The board credited community members who treated the wounded officers, described its recommendations as advisory and not binding, and said the report did not reflect the official position of the City of Oakland or the Police Department.

The attachment is police radio traffic taken from the Oakland Police Department's logging tapes and released by the department. It runs about 25 and a half minutes. A logging tape records an entire radio channel continuously rather than a single call, so routine traffic with no connection to the shootings runs alongside the incident transmissions. The released material has been described as covering the opening stages of the response on the afternoon of March 21, 2009, and the number of separate segments contained in it could not be confirmed from the available records. The board of inquiry said it based the times in its own timeline of events on Oakland police radio transmissions.