As Oakland struggled for answers Sunday in the somber aftermath of its deadliest police shooting, the family of the parolee who killed three officers and left another brain-dead, before being gunned down himself, could offer none.

Just an apology — and expressions of shock and dismay — but no answers.

Some relatives said Lovelle Mixon, convicted in a 2002 San Francisco carjacking and once a “person of interest” in a 2007 Oakland slaying, almost wanted to go back to prison. But when two motorcycle officers stopped the 26-year-old’s Buick just after 1 p.m. Saturday near 74th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, he apparently wasn’t ready to go.

Lovelle Mixon’s uncle, Curtis Mixon of Fremont, remembers his last cell phone call with his nephew. One minute they were talking about the recently purchased Buick’s 22-inch rims, the next Lovelle Mixon was being pulled over by a police officer. Then, nothing.

Other relatives told how Mixon had been “lost” after an adult life spent mostly behind bars. They talked about his depression. And they talked of last month’s missed meeting with a parole officer, leaving him a fugitive and once again on a collision course with prison.

“He didn’t know really where to start,” said Mixon’s wife, Amara Langston, 25. “He was trying to make himself a better person and trying to realize his mistakes and what he was doing was wrong.”

But none of that, for a city all too familiar with spasms of violence and stories of remorse, could explain how Saturday’s seemingly routine traffic stop in broad daylight sparked the brutality that finally played out in another tragic shootout later that afternoon.

As a tight-knit law enforcement community mourned the loss of four respected veterans, neighbors in hardscrabble East Oakland shook their heads at the senseless violence and pondered their own historically tense ties with police.

Still, from all corners of the city, there was an outpouring of support from residents and business owners — even from Attorney General Jerry Brown and a visiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — with flowers and candles appearing at the shooting scenes and in front of police stations, and offers of food and money extended to the victims’ stricken families.

“I feel sick and sad,” said Sharon Chipman, walking in the city’s well-heeled Montclair district. “This is such a complex, painful reality that people have to come together and heal. There is so much anger, frustration and tension, I’m just praying the community gets stronger. We need to reach out to each other.”

On Sunday afternoon police spokesman Jeff Thomason said that 41-year-old Officer John Hege of Concord was brain-dead but still on life support pending donating of his organs.

Killed Saturday were Sgt. Mark Dunakin, 40, of Tracy, who was shot along with Hege during the traffic stop; and Sgt. Ervin Romans, 43, of Danville, and Sgt. Daniel Sakai, 35, of Castro Valley, both slain at the apartment where the gunman was holed up. An unidentified fifth officer was grazed by a bullet and released after receiving treatment.

Investigators have still not disclosed whether the officers knew who Mixon was — or whether he was a fugitive likely bound for prison. Mixon, police say, eventually opened fire at the officers and then barricaded himself in his sisters’ apartment around the corner, killing two more officers as they tried to arrest him nearly two hours later.

Mixon’s 16-year-old sister, Reynete Mixon, said she was sleeping when police kicked in the door and threw flash grenades, one of which struck her and caused minor burns on her leg. She said she did not know her brother was in the apartment when she fled as shots rang out.

One woman, hosing down her driveway two doors down from the apartment where Mixon was killed, said some of those lives could have been saved.

She said neighbors knew immediately where Mixon had run, but they didn’t tell police — who combed the neighborhood — until nearly an hour later. But in East Oakland, lamented the woman, Elaine, who didn’t give her last name, that cooperation doesn’t easily happen.

“It makes you feel bad,” she said, wiping her eyes steps from blood spatters that clung stubbornly to a broken sidewalk on 74th Avenue. “But you just don’t want to be a snitch. The word, ‘snitch,’ it’s almost worse than murderer.”

The shootings weighed heavily on residents walking and worshipping Sunday in Oakland’s Eastmont neighborhood, where trash was blowing down busy streets in front of struggling businesses and where wrought-iron fences and window bars forebodingly frame humble bungalows on treeless side streets.

It’s a neighborhood where homicides are common enough to make residents concerned, although residents say the drug hustling and prostitution that pervaded the area has died down considerably since Oakland police opened a substation nearby 17 years ago.

On the minds of many was the New Year’s Day shooting of Oscar Grant, a black resident, by a white BART police officer, a killing that triggered bursts of outrage in the city. The shooting, and its subtext of racial discord, remains a sensitive subject. Only a few feet away from where the first two officers were killed, a flier alerts the community about an upcoming meeting on the Grant shooting.

“All we want is respect,” said Everstine Martin, whose husband is pastor at Prayer Mission Pentecostal Church on MacArthur Boulevard, and says she has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years. “I see police harassing people for no reason. Everyday, they are in this neighborhood casing the area. Do I think this is about Oscar Grant? No. But I would like to see more respect on both sides.”

The last assault on police this deadly came in 1970, when four California Highway Patrol officers were shot dead by two men in Southern California. The case prompted a reappraisal of police practices, and it’s likely Saturday’s shootings will do the same.

Bay Area News Group Staff Writers Kamika Dunlap and Paul T. Rosynsky and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact Denis C. Theriault at dtheriault@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5446.