In an hour long service, on Tuesday, March 31, singers, poets, and speakers congregated with around 500 people at an East Oakland church to mourn the death of a member of their community. He was remembered as an animated storyteller who loved boxing and football. They said he had a long and loving relationship with his wife of seven years, who was his childhood sweetheart. Who was this paragon who elicited such devotion? A killer of four, an alleged rapist—in multiple cases including one of a 12 year-old girl which DNA linked him to—and a convicted felon on parole with a history of violence.

Blame for his death has been placed on guns—and especially on Second Amendment advocates—on the Department of Corrections, on a “broken” parole system, even on the police who have sworn to protect—everywhere except where it should rightfully rest: on the criminal.

It began as a “routine” traffic stop. On Saturday, March 21, at approximately 1:00 PM two Oakland police officers, John Hedge and Mark Dunakin, stopped Lovelle Mixon for a traffic violation in East Oakland. Dunakin had radioed in the stop and walked up to Mixon asking for his license. Mixon complied and Dunakin brought the paperwork back to his motorcycle. That was when Mixon sprang out and shot both officers. The officers must have never seen it coming; neither was able to fire a single shot. Dunakin died at the scene and Hedge was mortally wounded. Hedge was on life support for a couple days and was declared brain dead and died after giving the ultimate gift of donating his organs to those in need.

The killer fled on foot provoking a door-to-door manhunt which included 200-some officers from at least five different agencies. They searched for hours with no help from the community until eventually an anonymous caller said Mixon was in an apartment building just blocks from the first scene. The SWAT team took control of the area and made numerous attempts to communicate with Mixon.

At about 3:30 PM, they forcibly entered the apartment where they had reason to believe Mixon was hiding and began searching. As they approached a closet, the suspect hiding there began shooting at them through the door with an AK 47 assault rifle. Two officers were killed and a third wounded before the suspect was killed by the team’s defensive fire. The wounded officer was shot in the shoulder and was grazed by another bullet; he was treated and released from the hospital.

Victims of violence are usually memorialized within hours with piles of flowers, stuffed animals, photos, and candles; yet by Sunday night when a few dozen people gathered at the first crime scene, only four votive candles had been placed there: an example of the neighborhood and community’s negativity, hatred, blame, and mistrust of the police.

Some young community members ignorantly or blindly blame the police because they “unnecessarily harass them,” because the police “have more power.” Others brought up the New Year’s shooting by white BART police of a black man (who was also violently resisting arrest), which incited several riot-like protests. Another young woman says she supports the police but acknowledges that she is in the minority. Nevertheless, she insightfully points out, “if we can’t turn to the police for protection, what are we supposed to do?”

Oakland investigators were perplexed by what triggered Mixon’s sudden outburst of violence, yet he was on parole for a 2002 conviction of assault with a deadly weapon in San Francisco causing his victim to need 16 stitches. He served six years and was released on parole in 2007 but went back to prison for nine months after violating his parole and was released in November 2008.  A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman said Mixon had a history of criminal behavior.
Court records show he accumulated a long list of juvenile offenses in Alameda County. Violence was not out of character as he was investigated last year for a homicide though prosecutors found there was insufficient evidence to charge him with murder (though they did not say that the evidence cleared him of wrongdoing).

The day before the shooting Mixon had been linked by DNA evidence to a rape of a 12 year-old girl in February who was dragged off the street at gun point in the East Oakland neighborhood where Mixon’s sister lived and where the killings occurred. The girl was savagely raped and sodomized. The victim got a good look at the attacker and was able to help police draw a sketch of the rapist which strongly resembles Mixon. He is under investigation for similar rapes, possibly as many as five, during recent months in the same neighborhood; DNA tests are pending and no arrest warrants were issued yet.

At the time of these killings there was a no-bail parole revocation warrant out for him because he deliberately skipped a meeting with his parole officer about three weeks ago as part of a quarrel he was having with the agent. Mixon had doggedly gotten mad at his parole officer because the agent had missed earlier appointments—a highly unlikely occurrence according to the spokesman for the Department of Corrections. Incredibly, the spokesman also said if authorities had found that Mixon had violated his parole he would have only faced a maximum of six months in prison.

“This is not the first time Oakland has sunk into citywide grief amid the complex and delicate issues linking race, crime, and law enforcement,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle reporters Carolyn Jones and Leslie Fulbright, in a March 24 article. “Oakland has a long history of incendiary relations between the police and the African American community.”

That conflict has been forced into the open by the murder of the four Oakland police officers.

The memorials built of Americans flags and red, white, and blue carnations honoring the slain officers at the scene of the crime were marred by another memorial, photo tribute, roses, and stuffed animals, for the killer Mixon.

A large crowd gathered at the apartment building where Mixon killed two SWAT team members, to grieve for Mixon. Mandingo Hayes, who came to support Mixon and his family, called the killer “a soldier,” and said, “I offer condolences to the families of the officers, but they can’t expect us to feel too much sorrow when eight men were killed by police last year and no one came to our communities to express their sadness.”

Another mourner, Lavette Jones concurred, saying, “We can’t be expected to feel for the police the way we feel for people from our community, getting shot and killed is part of life when you live in Oakland.”

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