According to a neighbor, Bích Câu was "marching zombielike down the sidewalk" and ignoring her youngest son, who was wandering in traffic at the intersection of Taylor and 12th Streets crying and asking for "his mommy.

[11] Bùi stated in an interview that the family had been living in the duplex for approximately three months; because the weather was hot, the sons often ran outside to the front yard.

[15] Bùi later testified that Bích Câu had exhibited symptoms of mental illness after their second child was born in 2000, but would often stop taking her anti-psychotic medication because it made her tired.

[12] While officers were en route, Bích Câu was heard by neighbors screaming in her home, prompting more calls to the police as a suspected domestic violence issue.

Again, Bích Câu's family disputed that account, saying that she had already been gesturing angrily with the utensil within the kitchen before officers arrived, as she had been employing it to try to pry the locked bedroom door open.

[17][18] The Santa Clara County District Attorney's office held a criminal grand jury of 18 members to decide on whether or not Marshall should be indicted for the shooting death.

[11] During the presentation of testimony, grand jurors would ask why police kept referring to the vegetable peeler as a knife, and Nishigaya admonished a crime scene investigator for calling Bích Câu "the suspect.

[20] Other police training instructors testified to the danger of any edged tool, stating that a charging attacker could stab an officer within 1.5 seconds from a distance of 7 yards (6.4 m).

[20] On October 30, 2003, the grand jury declined to indict Marshall after two hours of deliberation on charges of either manslaughter or murder in Bích Câu's death after a seven-day proceeding.

[25] A vigil with 400 people was held for Bích Câu[7] within days of the shooting, notable as one of the first responses by the Vietnamese-American community to issues in America, as opposed to anti-communist activism targeting Vietnam.

It was an organization that sought for justice in the case and demanded the San Jose Police Department to be culturally sensitive and adopt nonlethal tactics for subduing mentally disturbed people.

The organization held multiple protests at the San Jose City Hall and in November 2003, after the grand jury declined to indict Chad Marshall, the ethnically diverse group called for a federal investigation of Bích Câu's killing, contending that her history of interactions with the police, where she was angry yet remained nonviolent, illustrated that police were too quick to perceive ethnic minorities as inherently more threatening.

[7][27] On August 11, 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 227 into law, making California the first state to ban the use of grand juries to indict officers facing charges for fatal shootings.

The law effectively left the decision whether or not to present criminal charge(s) against officers involved in fatal shootings to the presiding district attorney.