On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a man and woman wearing masks approached a man at a sprawling park in an East Bay suburb where children gather to play baseball and soccer and frolic on the playground.
According to witnesses and police, the couple repeatedly shot the man in the parking lot of the Dublin Sports Grounds.
Police said they arrived at the scene and arrested the pair, quickly determining the alleged attackers were the victim’s in-laws.
The killing of Jonathan McKinsey, the director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, stunned the East Bay community and made public a year-long legal battle between him, his estranged wife and the in-laws now accused of killing him.
McKinsey, a 40-year-old transgender man, claimed in court documents he was on the receiving end of physical and emotional abuse and transphobic remarks by his wife, Candice Jang, and his in-laws. Jang claimed in her own filings that she and the couple’s three young children had endured years of abuse at the hands of her husband.
Their divorce proceedings, which began last December, have been tied up with clashes over finances and custody of their 7 and 3-year-old sons and their 5-year-old daughter. In court records filed this summer, each parent painted the other as abusive and unfit to care for the needs of their children.
The in-laws, Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, are in custody and now face murder charges. They could not be reached for comment and it’s not clear if an attorney is representing them.
Police have not revealed a motive for the attack, but court records exposed months of discord that appeared to be worsening.
McKinsey and Jang, a stay-at-home mom, began dating in 2008 and were married three years later in Texas. Eventually the couple moved to the Bay Area and McKinsey attended UC Berkeley where he received a master’s degree in 2015.
A decade later, there were signs of major fractures in the couple’s relationship, according to declarations filed in Alameda County Superior Court.
By October 2025, Jang had sought a domestic violence prevention order after she alleged her husband slapped their then 6-year-old across the face because the children were fighting over Lego blocks.
“I found my son cowering by a wall near his bedroom with a very large bruise the shape of a handprint on the left side of his face,” Jang wrote in the request for a restraining order.
The document also detailed more than a dozen instances of alleged abuse dating back to 2020 when McKinsey allegedly told her “I hope you drop dead. I hate you so much” during an argument. A judge granted the restraining order.
Jang reported the alleged slapping incident to police and told them that McKinsey had grabbed her arm during an incident in 2018, leaving a bruise, according to a probable cause declaration filed in court by police.
When deputies responded to the family’s home to talk with McKinsey, authorities found that the couple’s then 2-year-old son had been left home alone for more than an hour while McKinsey went shopping, according to the declaration.
McKinsey was charged in Alameda County with one count of cruelty to a child and corporal injury to a child, both misdemeanors. He pleaded not guilty to both charges and was released from jail on the condition that he complete parenting classes, court records show.
Two months after his wife was granted a restraining order, McKinsey filed for divorce —setting off waves of back and forth court filings in which the estranged couple traded allegations and accused one another of being unfit parents.
McKinsey alleged in court documents that he had been set up in October by his wife who was responsible for watching the children during the workweek. She had not told him that their son was sleeping upstairs in a crib before she left the house, he wrote.
In his own request for a restraining order filed in December 2025, McKinsey alleged that his wife was the one who regularly left the children home alone to run errands or work out.
“Despite not working and being home with the children, she failed to take care of their basic needs such as feeding them, bathing them, or changing their clothes and sheets. Most days, Candice did not feed the children until well after noon,” McKinsey wrote in his restraining order request.
“When I protested about any of this, she threatened me with harm, or said she would call the police and tell them that I was hurting our children,” he added.
McKinsey also accused his wife of physically abusing him on several occasions before their children were born, writing in court records that Jang tried to pull medical tubes from his body after a procedure related to his transition in 2010. In 2013, he wrote, she hit him on the head with a frying pan and forced him to eat a dead cockroach that she had found on the ground.
On another occasion, he said Jang struck him with a mirror. When he tried to pull it away from her, the glass shattered, severing a tendon and nerve in his hand, requiring surgery and leaving him with permanent loss of sensation in his thumb, he wrote in the restraining order request.
Jang and her attorney could not be reached for comment.
Tensions between the estranged spouses appeared to escalate this summer when McKinsey asked the court to allow him to visit his children without supervision. For much of the year, McKinsey has only been allowed supervised visits with his children.
“I miss our children deeply and am pleading with this court to allow me more time with them…” McKinsey wrote in a declaration filed in August.
Jang opposed removing the supervision requirement. Still, following a court hearing, a judge granted McKinsey unsupervised visitation twice per week for two hours “in locations where there are other people present, such as a library or playground.”
It is not clear whether McKinsey was at the park with his children when he was shot.
Jang’s parents, Zhang and Chen, who were booked on suspicion of murder, willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, conspiracy and child endangerment likely to produce great bodily injury or death, are also referenced in their daughter’s and McKinsey’s divorce filings.
McKinsey alleged in court filings that Jang’s mother used anti-LGBTQ+ slurs against him and one of the couple’s children, calling them a “disgusting queer” and a “pervert.” He accused Jang’s father of punching him in the chest when he was recovering from a mastectomy surgery, according to court records.
Zhang and Chen were arrested minutes after McKinsey was found fatally shot, lying behind the open trunk of an SUV in the sports complex parking lot.
Parkgoers who witnessed the shooting told CBS News Bay Area that the manand woman involved in the shooting were wearing masks and took turns firing the gun at McKinsey.
Witness Assad Razawi told ABC Bay Area he heard gunshotsat the park, then “I saw the guy drop to the floor: head bloody and chest bloody,” Razawi’s daughter added her father noticed a man and woman “casually walk away from the shooting.”
While it’s not clear what led up to the fatal shooting, both spouses had expressed concerns in court filings that the dispute between them could end in tragedy.
In December 2021 Jang said that she began sleeping with a pair of scissors near her bed for self protection amid a series of arguments with McKinsey, saying in court records that she feared for her safety.
McKinsey wrote in court records that he was “desperately afraid” that his wife might seek revenge and perhaps hurt their children. Jang has not been accused of any crime.
“I truly believe that she would hurt or even kill them if she believed there was any possibility of me having the children in my custody and care,” he wrote in his request for a restraining order.
Susanne Rust contributed to this report.
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