WALNUT CREEK, CA — A 40-year-old man was shot dead in the parking lot of a Tri-Valley sports park on a Saturday afternoon. His two elderly in-laws were in custody minutes later.
That is the short version.
Here is the rest of it. A sunny Saturday. A full parking lot, and a family the courts had been watching for months.
A normal Saturday, then gunfire
Jonathan McKinsey of Dublin ran engineering for New York Times Games. He spent his last afternoon at Dublin Sports Grounds, the big park off Dublin Boulevard, just down the road from the I-680 interchange.
It was a normal Saturday there. Soccer and flag football all day. Minivans and folding chairs.
Kids in cleats, the snack bar doing steady business under a warm sky.
Then, at 3:08 p.m., a Dublin police sergeant driving past spotted a man lying in the middle of the parking lot. He stopped to look. Dispatch, at nearly the same instant, lit up with 911 calls.
McKinsey had been shot multiple times. He died at the scene.
Who is in custody
Within minutes, officers detained two people who had stayed nearby. Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen. Both 77.
Both Dublin residents. A married couple — and McKinsey’s parents-in-law.
Witnesses told local TV the couple took turns firing.
By Sunday morning both were booked into Santa Rita Jail and held without bail. Police listed the suspected offenses as murder, conspiracy, willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, and child abuse.
Arraignment is set for Wednesday morning at the county courthouse in Dublin. As of Tuesday, the district attorney had not formally filed the case. The Alameda County District Attorney handles the charging decision.
What the neighbors got was the aftermath. Video showed McKinsey lying behind a white SUV with its rear hatch open, bystanders frozen a few yards off.
A worker nearby took a photo before police arrived. Police still have not announced a motive. They say only that McKinsey was deliberately targeted.
“There were kids and families, just like you see now. This parking lot is full on a Saturday. It’s incredible that they’d just do that right in front of everybody.”
— Kevin Stein, Dublin
What the court file shows
Court records fill in more of the picture. None of it is pretty.
A bitter custody fight. Dueling restraining orders. Abuse claims each side aimed at the other.
The filings cut both ways. His wife accused him of violence.
One 2025 incident, over a pile of Legos, left a handprint-shaped bruise on one child, per the restraining order.
Dublin police investigated, and prosecutors charged McKinsey with two misdemeanors: child endangerment and corporal injury to a child. He posted $50,000 bail and was trying to get into a mental-health diversion program.
Officers also reported finding his 2-year-old home alone while he was out shopping.
McKinsey fired back on paper. In his own December 2025 filing he described years of abuse by his wife, trouble he said ran back more than 15 years. He alleged she hit him with a frying pan in 2013.
He also said his mother-in-law aimed anti-LGBTQ+ slurs at him and one of the children. She is one of the two now accused of killing him.
The slurs, he wrote, came over the child’s clothing.
He said his father-in-law once punched him in the chest while he recovered from surgery tied to his transition as a transgender man. None of that is a verdict. It is a stack of accusations from a court file.
The man at the center of it is dead.
He never gets to answer. Two things stand out.
🗓 What We Know So Far
- Saturday, Sept. 26, about 3:08 p.m. — A Dublin police sergeant on patrol spots a man down in the parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, 6700 Dublin Blvd. Dispatch takes multiple 911 calls at the same time.
- Minutes later — Jonathan McKinsey, 40, of Dublin, is pronounced dead at the scene from multiple gunshot wounds.
- Shortly after — Officers detain two suspects who remained nearby: Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, a married couple and McKinsey’s parents-in-law.
- Sunday, Sept. 27 — Both are booked into Santa Rita Jail and held without bail on suspicion of murder, conspiracy, and related firearm and child-abuse counts. Police say McKinsey was deliberately targeted and have not announced a motive.
- Wednesday, Sept. 30, 9 a.m. — Arraignment scheduled at the Alameda County courthouse in Dublin.
What happens next
The first is the calendar. A three-day hearing on the dueling restraining orders was set for December. A custody hearing was days away.
The system could see this family coming from a long way off. It still ended in a parking lot.
The second is the setting, and I keep coming back to it.
These parks are where a town does its living. You drop a kid at a field, you trade small talk with the parent beside you, you lose track of the clock. Nobody should have to wonder, on a sunny Saturday, whether the parking lot is where it happens.
I have written about a lot of things in this town. A homicide in a youth sports parking lot is not one I want to get good at.
Prosecutors have not said whether they will file formal charges before Wednesday. Police have not filled in the gap between a custody calendar and a shooting. Detectives are still working the case.
Dublin is not Walnut Creek. But the Tri-Valley shares the same Saturday ritual.
A park packed with nine-year-olds feels the same whether the fields are off Dublin Boulevard or out here by Heather Farm.
If you want the local picture, we keep a running Walnut Creek crime roundup. We also tracked the numbers when crime against BART riders dropped after the new fare gates went in.
Anyone with information is asked to call Dublin police Sergeant Ahmad Mateen at 925-786-7989.
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