A New York Times engineering executive was shot dead in a sports park parking lot on Saturday afternoon. The two people arrested are his wife’s parents. Both are 77.
What happened
Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was head of engineering and games player experiences at The New York Times. He was found with multiple gunshot wounds in the parking lot of the Dublin Sports Grounds in Dublin, California, in Alameda County, at about 3:08 p.m. Saturday.
Officers pronounced him dead at the scene.
Shouyong Zhang, 77, and Shili Chen, 77, a married couple who live in Dublin, were arrested on suspicion of murder and booked into Santa Rita Jail. They are McKinsey’s parents-in-law.
Dublin Police Services credited bystanders with the speed of the arrests.
DPS thanks the witnesses and community members who assisted responding officers; their cooperation was critical to the swift arrest of the suspects.
Dublin Police Services
The custody case
McKinsey and his wife, Candice Jang, were in a contested custody dispute.
- A judge granted Jang’s petition for a domestic violence restraining order against McKinsey last year.
- McKinsey filed for divorce in December, with a hearing set for the following month.
- In August, the court approved hiring a private child custody evaluator.
A custody evaluator is what a family court brings in when the two sides cannot agree and the judge does not trust either account. It is a marker of a case that has gone badly.
Police have not stated a motive and detectives were still working the circumstances as of Monday.
Who he was
McKinsey had a bachelor’s degree from Georgia Tech and a master’s in computer science from UC Berkeley. He joined the Times in 2023 and ran the engineering side of its games operation, the division behind Wordle, the Crossword and Connections, which has become one of the most successful subscription products in American media.
The BeezLoop Take
Two 77-year-olds are accused of driving to a park on a Saturday afternoon and shooting their son-in-law in front of witnesses. Whatever else this is, it is not an argument that got out of hand. That is the detail that should stop people.
The restraining order has to be in this story, and it cuts in a direction that will make some readers uncomfortable. A judge granted McKinsey’s wife a domestic violence restraining order against him last year, which means a court found enough to act. That is a fact about the victim, and reporting it is not victim-blaming, it is the context a family court had already put on the record. It is also not a justification for anything. Nothing in a family court file authorizes anyone to shoot anybody in a parking lot.
What this case actually exposes is the custody exchange itself, and that is a fixable thing. American family courts routinely order high-conflict parents to hand children back and forth in public places chosen for convenience rather than safety, with no supervision and no security. Many counties have supervised exchange centers, staffed and monitored. They are underfunded, waitlisted, and usually reserved for cases already flagged as dangerous. This case had a restraining order, a divorce filing and a court-appointed evaluator, and the handoff still happened in a sports park lot.
We would resist the framing already circulating that this is a story about a Times executive. His job is why you are hearing about it, and that is worth being honest about. Custody exchanges turn violent in this country regularly and almost none of those killings get national coverage. The reason this one did is that the man who died built Wordle.
Both defendants are 77 and presumed innocent. A case like this will turn on what the witnesses saw, and by the police account there were several.
The question
Why are high-conflict custody exchanges, in cases a court has already flagged with restraining orders and evaluators, still happening in unsupervised public parking lots? And what did a family court know about this one before Saturday?
Related: a Florida man with a documented mental health history died firing at deputies in a domestic call.
Sources: NBC News · Fox News · CNN · Dublin Police Services
