In his comments on my blog "Parolee Guns Down Oakland Cops" (3-22-09), blogger Tom said....Any word on if any flash bangs were used or gas grenades before they attempted a dynamic entry? I am reproducing some excerpts from an extensive Los Angeles Times report by Maria La Ganga and Peter King which recounts the bloody chain of events in more detail than my earlier blog.
A resident across the hall from the apartment where the parolee hid out "heard a crash on a door and a young girl shout, 'Stop, wait!' Then came an explosion and rapid bursts of gunfire." To answer Tom's question, the explosion heard by the neighbor indicates that the SWAT team used a flash bang upon entering the parolee's hideout.
Here are some excerpts from the Los Angeles Times report:
MOURNFUL CALM FOLLOWS OAKLAND GUN BATTLE
By Maria L. La Ganga and Peter H. King
Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2009
OAKLAND, Calif. — 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.
Ervin Romans, 43, and Daniel Sakai, 35, both sergeants and SWAT team members, did not survive, and as the gunfire subsided Moore could hear the agonized cries of officers as they absorbed the toll of a brief but furious gun battle: "I heard one of them saying, 'It's not looking good. It's not looking good.' "
Moore could hear other officers shouting commands to Mixon's sister. She said there had been "a lot" of shooting "on both sides, from him and from them." Oakland Police Department spokesman Jeff Thomason said Mixon was armed with an assault weapon in the apartment shootout. He would not say what kind of weapon was used in the earlier shooting.
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Mixon, according to authorities, had a long criminal history. In addition to a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon, he had earlier convictions for marijuana possession, auto theft and a string of violations committed as a juvenile, Thomason said.
He had served nine months in prison for identity theft, forgery and grand theft before being released in November. According to state prison officials, Mixon missed a mandatory meeting with his agent last month and was deemed a "parolee at large." A warrant was issued for his arrest.
It is not unusual for parole officers to lose contact with their charges. At least 164, or 11%, of parolees assigned to Oakland's three parole divisions were considered at large last week, according to a report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
"When they do abscond, the department lacks the resources to track them down, and it's very hard to find people in a vast urban environment," said Ryken Grattet, a UC Davis professor who has written extensively about California's parole system.
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The violence Saturday was among the worst of its kind since 1970, when four California Highway Patrol officers were killed in a shootout in Newhall.
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