A couple in their 70s were arrested over the weekend after allegedly murdering their transgender son-in-law in a Bay Area public park just days before a scheduled hearing in an ongoing custody battle.

Police arrested Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen shortly after 3 pm on Saturday after witnesses identified them as the couple who allegedly approached 40-year-old Jonathan McKinsey in the parking lot of Dublin Sports Grounds in Dublin, California, took turns shooting him, and then calmly walked away, according to multiple outlets.

McKinsey was reportedly found lying on his back with multiple gunshot wounds in the parking lot behind a white SUV with its rear hatch open, The Mercury News reports. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Zhang and Chen, who are married and are the parents of McKinsey’s estranged wife, Candice Jang, are being held on suspicion of murder, conspiring to commit a crime, and child endangerment, according to the New York Times and other outlets. An arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday morning.

As of Tuesday, authorities had not announced a motive in the killing. But as multiple outlets report, court documents show McKinsey, the director of engineering for the New York Times’ games department, and Jang were involved in a bitter custody battle in which each had accused the other of abuse.

According to the California Post, McKinsey began his transition in 2010. The following year, he and Jang married. In October 2025, Jang reported McKinsey to Dublin police for allegedly striking one of their sons in the face with an open hand. She also told investigators of a previous incident in which she claimed McKinsey grabbed her arm, leaving a bruise, according to the New York Post. During the course of their investigation, police went to McKinsey’s home, where they reportedly found the couple’s two-year-old child left unsupervised while McKinsey was out shopping for over an hour.

McKinsey was charged with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was released from jail and required to complete 12 parenting classes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jang also filed for and was granted a domestic violence prevention order last year, claiming that McKinsey had been physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive toward her and their three children for years. She described more than a dozen incidents of abuse between November 2020 and July 2025, according to the Chronicle.

The following December, McKinsey filed a restraining order against Jang, claiming that she had been abusive toward him. He also filed for divorce.

McKinsey claimed that Jang framed him for the October 2025 incident in which their 2-year-old was left alone in their home, purposely failing to tell him the child was asleep upstairs before he left the house, the Times reported. He claimed that Jang abused and neglected their children, once hit him with a frying pan, and tried to pull medical tubing from his body following a transition-related procedure, according to The Mercury News.

He also accused Zhang of punching him in the chest in 2010 while he was still healing from top surgery and claimed that Chen, one of the murder suspects, had called both him and one of his sons a “disgusting queer” and a “pervert.”

According to The Mercury News, McKinsey had been trying to get into a mental health diversion program at the time of his death, which would have resulted in the 2025 child abuse charges being dropped. A hearing in McKinsey and Jang’s custody dispute was scheduled for this Friday.