A New York Times tech executive shot dead in a California parking lot by his elderly in-laws had faced child-abuse charges after his wife reported he struck their young son.
Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was gunned down around 3 p.m. Saturday in the parking lot of Dublin Sports Grounds in California’s East Bay. Witnesses described two masked assailants walking up and taking turns firing into him. First responders tried to save him. He died at the scene.
Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77 and the parents of McKinsey’s wife, Candice Jang, were booked into Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of murder. A passing officer made the arrests. The elderly couple is from the Dublin area and also has ties to Albuquerque, N.M.
The Post reported that booking records list the pair as facing scrutiny on first-degree murder, felony conspiracy, dangerously firing a gun, and child endangerment that could have caused major injury or death. Zhang stands 5 feet 8 and weighs 165 pounds. Chen measures 5 feet 2 and weighs 110 pounds, according to Alameda County Sheriff’s Office inmate records.
A New York Times spokesman confirmed McKinsey was the victim of the Saturday afternoon shooting and that he had worked for the newspaper since 2023. At the Times he rose to director of engineering for games player experience and led a 25-person team.
Court records show Alameda prosecutors charged McKinsey in 2025 with two counts of misdemeanor child abuse. The case started when Candice Jang called Dublin police and reported that McKinsey had hit her six-year-old son in the face with an open hand.
She also told investigators about a 2018 domestic violence incident in which McKinsey bruised her left arm, the documents say. When officers went to the home, a deputy sheriff said they found the couple’s two-year-old child alone in an upstairs room while McKinsey was out shopping.
McKinsey pleaded not guilty to both counts. He was released from jail on the condition that he take parenting classes. No motive has been publicly stated for the parking-lot shooting, and the relationship history beyond the marriage itself is not laid out in the available records.
McKinsey built a long tech résumé before the Times job. He held software engineering roles that began in the late 2000s at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Oracle, and later did product strategy work at Coursera. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from UC Berkeley in 2015.
Around 2018 he moved into engineering management at UKG. He later worked at Splunk. In early 2023 he joined the New York Times as a senior engineering manager for the games platform. By late 2025 he had stepped up to director of engineering for games player experience.
On LinkedIn late Sunday, Nathan Wu, who LinkedIn lists as having worked at UC Berkeley, left a short note: “Rip buddy.”
Zhang and Chen remain booked at Santa Rita Jail on the suspicion-of-murder hold and the additional counts reflected in the booking file. Authorities have not released a detailed incident narrative beyond the witness account of two masked shooters, the time and place of the attack, and the arrests by a passing officer.
McKinsey’s prior case is a matter of public court record: the 2025 child-abuse charges, the wife’s report of the open-hand strike to the six-year-old, the 2018 bruising allegation she described to investigators, the toddler found alone upstairs, the not-guilty pleas, and the parenting-class condition of release. Those facts now sit beside the parking-lot killing that ended his life.
Family violence leaves a trail. Courts, cops, and relatives all see pieces of it. When the next chapter is gunfire in a public lot, the public is left with the record that already existed and the hard work of holding every party to account under the law.
