The Associated Press
SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- When police arrived at Cau Bich Tran’s apartment, responding to a call that her 2-year-old son was wandering alone in the street, two officers found the petit Vietnamese woman brandishing a kitchen tool.
Within seconds, she was dead from an officer’s bullet.
The July 13 shooting touched off an explosion of anger in San Jose’s Vietnamese community, the nation’s second largest after Little Saigon in Orange County, California.
Hoping to ease those tensions, a grand jury’s investigation that began Tuesday was opened to the public, a rare occasion that drew an overflow crowd.
Police say the 4-foot-11, 98-pound, who had a history of mental illness, posed a danger to the officers, as well as to the man she lived with and their two sons.
The officers said Tran, 25, threatened them with a knife or cleaver, which turned out to be a dao bao, a vegetable peeler used throughout Asia that has no sharp outward edges.
Although most evidence suggested Tran was poised to throw the utensil, the hearing did little to dispel skepticism among many immigrants.
“My consistent understanding, three months ago and today, is that the killing was not only premature but an excessive use of force,” said San Jose resident Sam Ho. “No one could have determined that she was a threat in only a few seconds.”
Members of the city’s 83,000-member Vietnamese community have picketed City Hall for months, complaining that San Jose’s 1,400-member police force isn’t culturally sensitive and needs more Vietnamese-speaking officers. Only about three dozen officers speak Vietnamese, and neither of the men called to Tran’s apartment could.
Within days of the shooting, police expressed condolences in Vietnamese on the radio and in local newspapers. The police chief apologized to the family.
At Tuesday’s hearing, deputy district attorney Dan Nishigaya stressed Tran’s mental troubles and said police had intervened nine times in violent arguments between her and her boyfriend and others since 2001.
One witness testified that Tran had spent the moments before her death babbling, flailing her arms, screaming and crying on the streets near her tiny apartment.
“She was totally out of it,” said Joy L. Tamez, who saw much of the incident from across the street.
Andrew Schwartz, who represents Tran’s family, said events prior to the officers’ arrival were irrelevant.
Scores of Vietnamese residents attended the grand jury hearing, only the second in Santa Clara County to be conducted in public. In 1996, a grand jury declined to indict an officer in the death of an unarmed drunken driver who was shot in the back of the neck while running from police.
The main courtroom at San Jose’s Hall of Justice was filled to capacity, and an adjacent room with closed-circuit television provided translation to a few dozen Vietnamese immigrants.
Seven men and 11 women serving as grand jurors will take about a week to decide whether to indict officer Chad Marshall, who could testify next week.
According to Nishigaya, Tran raised the blade above her head and was approaching Marshall when he fired.
Police officer Tom Mun, who accompanied Marshall July 13, said repeatedly on the witness stand that neither officer had time to ponder options posed by the jurors, such as using pepper spray to restrain Tran or maiming her. Mun told jurors he, too, aimed his gun at Tran’s chest but didn’t have his finger on the trigger.
“The event happened so quickly, there was no safe way for us to retreat quickly,” Mun said. “The whole event happened in seconds -- there was no time for us to react any other way.”
Regardless of whether the jury indicts Marshall, Schwartz said Tuesday he plans to file a civil lawsuit in federal court, seeking financial compensation for Tran’s sons, age 2 and 4, and her parents.