SAN JOSE, Calif. — The man gunned down Saturday afternoon at a Dublin sports complex spent the past year embroiled in a bitter custody dispute with his wife — the suspects’ daughter, a woman whom he accused of abuse shortly after his own arrest on child abuse and endangerment charges in late 2025, court records show.

The legal dispute between Jonathan McKinsey, 40, and his wife appeared set to resume in a court hearing Friday, days before he was he was shot dead in the Dublin Sports Grounds parking lot in the city’s first homicide of the year.

The contentious legal battle was among several new details to emerge Monday on the ties between Jonathan McKinsey and the two people accused of fatally shooting him.

Authorities say McKinsey’s parents-in-law, Shouyong Zhang, 77, and Shili Chen, 77, were arrested as they calmly walked away from the bloody scene shortly after 3 p.m. Saturday. Both are being held without bail on suspicion of murder and a slew of other felonies at Santa Rita Jail and are scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

Video captured immediately after the shooting Saturday showed McKinsey lying on his back in a pool of blood, right behind a white SUV with its rear hatch open. Bystanders could be seen standing feet away, with one woman frantically looking around and holding a hand to her face in shock.

Dublin police have yet to announce a motive in the killing, saying only that McKinsey was deliberately targeted. On Monday, Dublin police declined to comment further about the killing, citing the fact that investigators had yet to present their case to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

Attempts by this news outlet to reach an attorney for McKinsey was unsuccessful. A message left with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office was not immediately returned.

Court records show the custody dispute between McKinsey and the suspects’ daughter, Candice Jang, was set to resume this week with a court hearing Friday, amid competing claims of abuse and dueling allegations that each were ill-suited to care for their children.

In court filings over the last year, McKinsey faced multiple allegations of abuse by Jang, his wife of more than a decade. In one instance, she alleged McKinsey hit one of her sons in the face during an argument over Legos, leaving a “very large bruise the shape of a handprint” on his face, according to a restraining order that the woman sought against McKinsey.

Dublin police later opened a criminal investigation into those claims, during which Jang claimed McKinsey had previously been been violent with her in 2018 by grabbing her wrist to the point that she had been bruised, according to court records. Officers also claimed they found McKinsey’s 2-year-old child alone in the house while the man had been out shopping.

Alameda County prosecutors subsequently charged McKinsey with two misdemeanors — cruelty to a child by endangering health, and corporal injury to a child. He was freed on $50,000 bail and, at the time of his killing, had been in the process of trying to get into a mental health diversion program. If successfully completed, the program would have resulted in the charges being dismissed.

In subsequent court filings, an attorney for Jang claimed that McKinsey “is simply prone to domestic violence and child abuse,” and that Jang said the incident was “far from the first time” that he had “committed physical violence against me or our family members.”

“Due to his violent and negligent history, our children are simply not safe when left unsupervised and in his care,” Jang wrote in a court filing last month.

McKinsey responded in December 2025 with his own request for a restraining order against Jang — alleging years of abuse by his wife that dated back more than 15 years, including one incident in 2013 where he claimed to have been beaten with a frying pan, the filing shows. He additionally accused Jang of verbally denigrating their children.

His petition also alleged that Jang’s mother — shooting suspect Shili Chen — had been verbally abusive to one of the couple’s young children, raising vocal objections over one child’s clothing choice. The alleged tirade came in the midst of tensions between Chen and McKinsey over his being transgender, having transitioned in 2010 from female to male. According to the petition, Shili Chen had referred first to the child, then to McKinsey, as a “disgusting queer” and a “pervert.”

In his filing, McKinsey accused Jang of having been abusive during his transition medical procedures. In one instance, he claimed Jang tried to pull out medical tubes from his body shortly after one procedure, the filing said.

McKinsey also claimed Jang’s father, who was not named in the filing, punched McKinsey in the chest while he was recovering from his double mastectomy surgery.

A call by this news outlet to Jang’s attorney was not immediately returned early Monday afternoon.

A LinkedIn page bearing McKinsey’s name shows him having worked at The New York Times for the last three-plus years, most recently as director of engineering, games player experience. An email by this news outlet to The New York Times Company was not immediately returned Monday afternoon.

On Monday, several neighbors in McKinsey’s apartment building said they seldom saw McKinsey or Jang, and many of them declined to comment further for this article. One person, who only gave her first name of Eva, told the Bay Area News Group she had arrived home about midnight on Sunday to find several sheriff’s deputy vehicles parked outside McKinsey’s apartment — a sight that was “extremely shocking” for the normally “quiet neighborhood.”

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(East Bay Editor Cyrus Farivar contributed to this story.)

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