New York Times Executive Shot Dead After Child Abuse Allegations — Elderly In-Laws Arrested

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This is a wild story.

John McKinsey, the New York Times‘ director of engineering for games player experience, was reportedly shot dead by his 77-year-old Chinese in-laws in a parking lot over the weekend.

Here are the details:

BREAKING: A New York Times Games engineering director is dead and his parents-in-law were arrested shortly after the deadly shooting.

Police say Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found with multiple gunshot wounds Saturday afternoon in a Dublin, California, sports complex parking lot… pic.twitter.com/8I21w4kvwb

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 28, 2026


BREAKING: A New York Times Games engineering director is dead and his parents-in-law were arrested shortly after the deadly shooting.

Police say Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found with multiple gunshot wounds Saturday afternoon in a Dublin, California, sports complex parking lot and pronounced dead at the scene.

His parents-in-law, Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, were arrested on suspicion of murder within minutes after witnesses helped officers identify them.

Police say there are no outstanding suspects. A possible motive has not been released.

The suspects have been identified as Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen — the parents of McKinsey’s wife Candice Jang, whom he was in the middle of divorcing.

Here are the mugshots of the in-laws who allegedly murdered McKinsey:

The contentious legal battle is among several new details to emerge Monday on the ties between Jonathan McKinsey and the two people accused of fatally shooting him. https://t.co/RKMl43HDia

— Mercury News (@mercnews) September 28, 2026




Zhang and Chen are in custody and facing multiple charges.

The New York Post reported further:

Officers patrolling the area spotted McKinsey with multiple gunshot wounds as emergency dispatch began receiving a flood of 911 calls.

First responders attempted aid, but he died at the scene. Witnesses reported seeing two masked assailants approach McKinsey in the lot.

They said the shooters took turns unloading bullets into the victim before they were quickly arrested by a passing cop.

Harrowing footage from the scene showed a body lying in the parking lot in broad daylight, before a couple was bundled into the back of a cop car.

Zhang, who stands 5 feet 8 and weighs 165 pounds, allegedly carried out the attack alongside his wife, who measures just 5 feet 2 and weighs 110 pounds, according to Alameda County Sheriff’s Office inmate records.

While the elderly couple is from the Dublin area, they also have ties to Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Post had learned.

Zhang and Chen were booked into Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of murder. McKinsey had been married to their daughter Candice Jang, the Post can reveal.

According to the booking records, the couple is looking at a whole stack of serious charges, including first-degree murder, felony conspiracy, dangerously firing a gun, and child endangerment that could’ve caused major injury or death.

McKinsey’s tech career spans nearly two decades, kicking off in the late 2000s with hands-on software engineering roles at heavyweights like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Oracle, along with a stint in product strategy at Coursera.

By 2018, he made the jump into engineering management at UKG, eventually leveling up through leadership roles at Splunk.

He joined the New York Times in early 2023 as a senior engineering manager for the games platform, overseeing infrastructure for viral hits like Connections and scaling systems to handle massive traffic surges.

He then moved to the games player experience team as a senior engineering manager and ultimately stepped up as the director of engineering for games player experience in late 2025, where he led a 25-person team driving feature innovation and monetization for millions of daily puzzle players.

Court records shed some light on the possible motivation behind the murder.

McKinsey had been charged in 2025 for a child abuse incident, and he and his wife had both sought domestic violence restraining orders against each other.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Alameda County court records show that McKinsey and his wife, Candice Jang, were involved in a series of legal disputes in the year before his death. Jang sought a domestic violence restraining order against McKinsey in October 2025; McKinsey sought one against Jang in December. McKinsey also filed for divorce in December, and the couple continued to litigate child custody this year. Separately, McKinsey was charged in October 2025 with two misdemeanors involving child endangerment and injury to a child. Records appear to show McKinsey and Jang got married in Harris County, Texas, in 2011.

ABC 7 provided additional coverage and some images from the scene in this clip:

A New York Times executive was shot dead in a Dublin, California park Saturday afternoon. A masked man shot Jonathan McKinsey, handed the gun to a masked woman, and she shot him again. Then both walked off calm.

They're his wife's parents. Both 77.

Cops charged them with…

— IredcapI (@IredcapI) September 28, 2026

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[ H/T WLT Report ]

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