The New York Times technology executive who was allegedly fatally shot by his elderly in-laws in California had a history involving domestic violence and child-abuse allegations, court records reviewed by The Post show.
Jonathan McKinsey, 40, the newspaper’s director of engineering for games player experience, was killed at about 3 p.m. Saturday in the parking lot of Dublin Sports Grounds, police said. The suspects were identified as Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77.
Alameda County court records show McKinsey was charged in 2025 with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse.
The charges followed a call to Dublin police from his wife, Candice Jang, who reported that McKinsey had struck her six-year-old son in the face with an open hand, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jang also described a 2018 domestic-violence incident in which, according to court documents, McKinsey bruised her left arm.
When deputies went to the family’s home, they found the couple’s two-year-old child alone upstairs while McKinsey was out shopping, a sheriff’s deputy said.
McKinsey pleaded not guilty to both charges and was released from jail on the condition that he attend parenting classes.
A Times spokesperson confirmed that McKinsey was the victim of Saturday afternoon’s shooting and said he had worked for the newspaper since 2023.
First responders tried to save him, but he died at the scene. Witnesses said two masked attackers approached McKinsey in the parking lot.
According to witnesses, the gunmen took turns firing at McKinsey before a police officer passing by quickly arrested them.
Disturbing footage from the scene appeared to show a body lying in the parking lot in broad daylight, while two people were placed in the back of a police vehicle.
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Alameda County Sheriff’s Office inmate records state that Zhang is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 165 pounds. His wife, Chen, is listed as 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 110 pounds.
The couple is from the Dublin area and also has ties to Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Post reported.
Zhang and Chen were booked into Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of murder. McKinsey had been married to their daughter, Jang.
Booking records list potential charges including first-degree murder, felony conspiracy, reckless discharge of a firearm and child endangerment likely to cause serious injury or death.
McKinsey’s technology career spanned nearly two decades. He began in the late 2000s as a software engineer with organizations including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle, and later worked in product strategy at Coursera.
In 2018, he moved into engineering management at UKG before taking on a series of leadership positions at Splunk.
McKinsey joined The New York Times in early 2023 as a senior engineering manager for the games platform. In that role, he oversaw infrastructure supporting popular titles such as Connections and helped scale systems for major spikes in traffic.
He later joined the games player experience team as a senior engineering manager and became its director of engineering in late 2025. He led a 25-person team focused on developing features and monetization for millions of daily puzzle players.
McKinsey earned a master’s degree in computer science from UC Berkeley in 2015.
Nathan Wu, whose LinkedIn says he worked at UC Berkeley, wrote in a comment on his LinkedIn late Sunday: “Rip buddy.”