NYT Employee Gunned Down in Broad Daylight

A New York Times employee was gunned down in a Bay Area park on Saturday. Now, the authorities are accusing the victim’s parents-in-law of murdering him.

The victim was 40-year-old Jonathan McKinsey, who worked as an engineer in the newspaper’s games department.

From The New York Times:

A Bay Area couple have been accused of shooting and killing their son-in-law in a suburban sports park on Saturday afternoon, the local police said.
The man, Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. in a parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, an athletic complex and playground in Dublin, Calif., about 35 miles east of downtown San Francisco, according to Dublin Police Services.
Mr. McKinsey was director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, according to a company spokesman. Before Mr. McKinsey began working at The Times in 2023, he worked for several tech companies including Splunk, Coursera and Oracle, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The authorities arrested Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 76, in the shooting. They are a married couple who live in Dublin and are the parents of Mr. McKinsey’s wife, the police said.
No motive was described by the police for the shooting, but Mr. McKinsey and his wife had a turbulent marriage and were living separately, records show. Each had filed requests for domestic violence restraining orders against the other last year in Alameda County. Mr. McKinsey had also pleaded not guilty last year to two charges of misdemeanor child abuse.
Mr. McKinsey was a transgender man and accused his wife, Candice Jang, and his in-laws of abusing him because of his identity, according to his filing for a restraining order in December 2025. He said his mother-in-law called him and one of his sons a “pervert” and a “monster” after the boy tried on dresses, and he accused his father-in-law of punching him in the chest while he was recovering from double mastectomy surgery in 2010.

New York Times tech exec is shot dead by his elderly Chinese in-laws at California sports complex
“They said the shooters took turns unloading bullets into the victim before they were quickly arrested by a passing cop.”https://t.co/0Y3Mieyabs
— Christopher Shaker (@cjshaker) September 28, 2026

The shooting comes after an ongoing family legal fight involving McKinsey and Jang. Last year, they both requested restraining orders against each other, along with divorce filings after Jang alleged that McKinsey grabbed her by the forearms and dropped her on a table. Jang said she sustained a fractured vertebra from the incident.

The 40-year-old man killed near a Dublin park, allegedly by his in-laws – who witnesses said took turns shooting at him – was a New York Times games engineer who had previously been charged with child abuse. https://t.co/PpWIyqbNuj
— FOX 7 Austin (@fox7austin) September 29, 2026

Jang also accused McKinsey of striking their six-year-old child in the face. In another incident, police officers found the child unsupervised for more than an hour. The authorities charged McKinsey with two misdemeanor child-abuse counts. He pleaded not guilty and claimed he’d been framed. “She did this on purpose, to set me up.”

McKinsey accused Jang of abusing and neglecting the children. “When I protested about any of this, she threatened me with harm or said she would call the police and tell them I was hurting our children,” he said in a written statement.

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