NY Times tech exec in domestic row with ex-wife shot dead by elderly in-laws

Police arrest a 76-year-old man and his wife who were accused of shooting and killing Jonathan McKinsey, 40, in a parking lot.

SAN FRANCISCO – A Bay Area couple have been accused of shooting and killing their son-in-law in a suburban sports park on Sept 26, local police have said.

The man, Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 3pm in a parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, an athletic complex and playground in Dublin, California, about 56km east of downtown San Francisco, according to Dublin Police Services.

McKinsey was director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, according to a company spokesman.

Before 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 did not describe a motive for the shooting, but McKinsey and his wife had a turbulent marriage and were living separately, records show.

Each filed requests for domestic violence restraining orders against the other in 2025. McKinsey also pleaded not guilty in 2025 to two charges of misdemeanor child abuse.

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.

Assad Razawi, a resident of Dublin, said he was outside a grocery store near his car on Sept 26 at around 3pm when he heard what sounded like five or six gunshots coming from the sports park across the street.

When he looked over, he said he saw a man drop to the ground in the parking lot and another man and woman walking calmly away from the scene. The San Francisco Chronicle was first to report Razawi’s account.

Around the same time, a Dublin police sergeant was driving by the park when he saw a man lying on the ground and stopped to investigate, local police said. Emergency personnel began arriving after receiving 911 calls from people in the park about the shooting.

Witnesses directed officers to two individuals standing nearby, whom police identified as Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 76. They are a married couple who live in Dublin and are the parents of McKinsey’s wife, the police said.

Zhang and Chen were held on suspicion of murder, and detectives are continuing to investigate.

They also were held on suspicion of willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, conspiracy, and child endangerment likely to produce great bodily injury or death. It was not clear which children the last booking charge pertained to.

They are scheduled to be arraigned on Sept 30. It was unclear whether Zhang and Chen had legal representation.

Alameda County court records show that McKinsey’s wife, Jang, filed a request for a temporary restraining order citing domestic violence in October 2025. She also sought a protective order against McKinsey for her three children and her mother.

A report from the Dublin Police Services noted that on Oct 17, an officer met with Jang, who said her husband struck their six-year-old “in the face with an open hand”.

When officers went to the residence to contact McKinsey, they discovered a two-year-old child in an upstairs bedroom who had been left without supervision. The officers said McKinsey left the child alone for more than an hour while he went shopping.

McKinsey was later charged in Alameda County Superior Court with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse in connection with the separate incidents.

He pleaded not guilty to both charges and was released from jail on the condition that he complete 12 parenting classes. A pretrial hearing had been scheduled for October.

In December, McKinsey also filed for a temporary restraining order against his wife, citing domestic violence. According to his request, his wife had been granted full custody of the children, and he feared for their safety.

That same month, he filed for divorce.

McKinsey said he was framed for the October incident in which the couple’s two-year-old son was found alone.

He said Jang was responsible for the children during the workweek, and that she did not tell him before leaving that the child was sleeping in his crib upstairs. “She did this on purpose, to set me up,” he wrote.

In his filing, he accused his wife of regularly abusing their children and neglecting to properly bathe and feed them.

“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 the filing.

He said Jang once hit him on the head with a frying pan and forced him to ingest a cockroach.

He accused her, on another occasion, of striking him on the head with a mirror, which shattered as he tried to wrest it from her control and severed a tendon and nerve in his hand, requiring surgery and leaving him with a permanent loss of sensation in his thumb.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.