Prosecutors have reset arraignments as they try to combine a San Gabriel shooting with a Walnut Creek double-homicide prosecution.
MARTINEZ, Calif. — A Contra Costa County courtroom is becoming the center of a murder case that began in two different counties and now involves three defendants, three dead victims and prosecutors’ attempt to try the whole matter as one connected prosecution.
The immediate focus is procedural. Howard Wang, 43, was already charged in the Sept. 18, 2025, killings of his wife, Linlin Guo, and her mother, Beimin Cheng, in Walnut Creek. On March 30, prosecutors added a murder charge accusing him in the June 8, 2024, shooting death of Chengli Li in San Gabriel. That same filing also charged Demarques James Pearl, 33, in Li’s killing. The district attorney’s office says the planning for that shooting happened in Contra Costa County, giving prosecutors a basis to bring the Southern California case into the Walnut Creek prosecution.
The calendar changed almost immediately. Both men had been scheduled to be arraigned March 30 at the A.F. Bray Courthouse annex in Martinez, but defense attorneys asked the court to reschedule the hearings. Pearl is now set for arraignment April 1, and Howard Wang is scheduled to appear April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Those hearings are likely to shape the first public arguments over how the joined case will proceed, what counts will remain linked and how quickly prosecutors will move toward preliminary hearing or other pretrial stages.
Beyond Howard Wang and Pearl, the case already includes a third defendant. Yan Wang, 45, of Oakland was charged in September 2025 with accessory after the fact, first-degree residential burglary and destruction of evidence. Prosecutors say she helped Howard Wang avoid arrest after Guo and Cheng were killed, entered the residence on Sept. 19, 2025, with intent to commit larceny and destroyed cellphones to prevent evidence from being produced. She is not accused in the homicide counts announced against Howard Wang and Pearl, but her case sits close enough to the others that the courtroom proceedings are likely to keep drawing attention to her alleged role.
The facts prosecutors have outlined in public filings are stark. In the newest charge, they say Howard Wang and Pearl planned Li’s killing, drove south from the Bay Area on June 7, 2024, and carried it out the next day outside Li’s San Gabriel apartment, with Pearl as shooter and Wang as getaway driver. In the Walnut Creek case, prosecutors say Howard Wang later slit Guo’s and Cheng’s throats inside the Kelobra Court home, then fired shots and tried to cast blame on an unknown intruder. Walnut Creek police have said officers responded around 11:45 p.m. on Sept. 18, 2025, to reports of a disturbance and possible gunfire and found two women dead.
The reason the hearings matter is not only that they move the case forward. They will also begin to show how prosecutors intend to explain motive and sequence in a prosecution that crosses county lines and mixes domestic violence allegations with a claimed murder-for-hire plot. Public statements say Li had been the romantic partner of Yan Wang, whom prosecutors identify as Howard Wang’s girlfriend. Earlier filings in the Walnut Creek case also accused Howard Wang of threatening Guo in August 2024 and preventing her from reporting a crime in January 2023. For now, those facts sit in the charging record. The court process will determine how they are organized, challenged and eventually presented to a jury, if the case gets that far.
There are still major unknowns. Prosecutors have not publicly laid out every piece of evidence tying the three killings together, and the defense has not yet given a full response in open court to the broadened case theory. It is also not clear when the court will decide the long-term schedule for hearings or whether motions over joinder, evidence or venue will reshape the prosecution. Even so, the April dates are important because they mark the first step after the district attorney formally turned two separate homicide matters into one combined courtroom fight.
For now, the next milestone is simple and specific: Pearl is due April 1, and Howard Wang is due April 14 in Martinez, where the outline of the joined case is expected to come into sharper public view.
Author note: Last updated April 20, 2026.