As Dallas prepares to bury five police officers killed by a sniper last week, the attack is stirring up difficult memories for Oakland police.

The Oakland Police Department suffered its deadliest attack seven years ago when a parolee shot and killed four officers on March 21, 2009. It has taken years for the local force to try and recover, and some of them will be watching the memorials in Dallas knowing those officers are heading into some dark days of their own.

In 2009, the OPD interim chief was Howard Jordan. He recalls that chilly March day when motorcycle cops Mark Dunakin and John Hege pulled over a car in East Oakland. The driver was Lovelle Mixon, a parolee with a warrant out for his arrest. In a few short moments Mixon shot both officers and fled, setting off an intensive manhunt.

Jordan was driving his daughter back from a soccer tournament that day and had just exited the freeway when he got the call. "They  just told me that one of our motorcycle officers was down," he remembers.

By the time Jordan made his way to the hospital, Dunakin had already died and Hege was on life support.  Jordan found a crowd of Oakland police in the lobby, wanting to pay last respects to the fallen officers.  There would be more deaths within hours.

As Jordan pulled into the parking lot of the Eastmont station he heard over the police radio that two other officers had been killed. Jordan thought he had misheard. "I said, 'Hey, is this a repeat?  Is this happening?  Is this two new officers?'"

Two other officers had indeed been shot dead trying to capture Mixon in a home: SWAT team officers Daniel Sakai and Ervin Romans.  The shooter was then killed by another member of that team.  As Oakland headed into the funerals the next week, the grief for many was overwhelming.

The SWAT team captain at the time was Ed Tracey, who is now deceased. Tracey spoke with KQED reporter Stephanie Martin Taylor just days before the funeral for the four officers.  "What it does to our department is, it's hurting us," Tracey said. "It’s tearing us up. It’s so traumatic for me as a captain of this division, of the SWAT team, because I know I lost two of my best team leaders.  So when they fall, everybody’s vulnerable."

One of the first steps former Oakland chief Jordan says he took at the time was to visit each officer’s family.  "To talk to every family member present at that house -- I did that personally," says Jordan.  "I did not delegate that. Because what I didn’t want to happen, I didn’t want to  meet the families for the first time at the officers' funeral."

But Jordan says that after the horror of the moment is over, some of the toughest times begin. He traces the suicides of two officers to that day in 2009. Others, he says, turned to alcohol or became unstable and retired early.  Some of the officers who saw their colleagues die that day went on leave and never came back to the job.

In the wake of the Texas shootings, Dallas Police Chief David Brown has been getting praise for his handling of the situation -- and for his emotional honesty.  The morning after the attack, Brown said, “We’re hurting, our profession is hurting, Dallas officers are hurting,”

Jordan says the chief’s  acknowledgement of the severity of the situation can help officers cope and it sends a message. "That we’re not discounting or trying to minimize what happened," Jordan says. "We’re going to face the issue, the fact that this is a very difficult situation. We’re going to face it head-on."

But that doesn’t mean that Oakland officers ever got over it. Since the Dallas shooting, Jordan says, Oakland police he knew then have been texting and calling him to talk, as the memories resurface.