A New York Times engineering executive was shot dead in a sports park parking lot. His wife’s parents, both 77, have now been charged with murder, and prosecutors say they were lying in wait. One of them has admitted firing.
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
What are they charged with?
Update. Prosecutors have filed charges against Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen.
- Murder.
- Conspiracy to fraudulently obtain money.
- Willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence.
- Child abuse.
The criminal complaint alleges the pair were lying in wait, which is an allegation of premeditation rather than a confrontation that escalated.
According to the filing, Zhang admitted shooting McKinsey. Chen invoked her right to remain silent. Police have surveillance footage and three witness identifications.
Both were expected back in court Thursday to enter pleas. Charges are accusations and neither has been convicted.
Prosecutors have not publicly explained what the conspiracy to fraudulently obtain money count refers to, or the conduct behind the child abuse count. Those two are the most consequential unexplained items in the case, because they suggest the state sees something beyond a single afternoon.
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. Correction: our original version mentioned only that order. McKinsey had also obtained a protective order against Jang. Both parties held orders against each other, which describes a different situation than a one-way finding, and we should have said so the first time.
- 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 orders have to be in this story, and they cut in both directions. A judge granted McKinsey’s wife a domestic violence restraining order against him, and he obtained a protective order against her. Two people with mutual orders is a portrait of a marriage that had become dangerous to be inside, not a finding about which one was the danger. 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 somebody 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.
What did a family court know about this one before Saturday?
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 · City of Dublin, California
