A New York Times tech exec was blasted to death in broad daylight by his elderly Chinese in-laws, who allegedly took turns pumping bullets into him in a California sports-complex parking lot.
Jonathan McKinsey, 40, the paper’s head of engineering for games player experience, was found riddled with gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. Saturday at Dublin Sports Grounds in Dublin, Calif. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Cops say his wife’s parents, Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, approached him masked, then calmly traded off firing until he dropped. A passing sergeant spotted McKinsey on the pavement as 911 lines lit up. Witnesses flagged the pair in a black sedan nearby. They were cuffed within minutes.
“I saw the guy drop to the floor. Head bloody and chest bloody,” witness Assad Razawi told ABC7. Another onlooker said the couple “casually” walked away after the barrage.
Zhang, 5-foot-8 and 165 pounds, and Chen, 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds, were booked into Santa Rita Jail without bail on first-degree murder, felony conspiracy, child endangerment and unlawfully discharging a firearm. Arraignment is set for Wednesday.
McKinsey had been married to their daughter, Candice Jang. A neighbor told local reporters he had recently moved out of the home he shared with his wife and three kids.
Police have not announced a motive. Court records, however, show McKinsey was charged last year in Alameda County with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse after his wife told investigators he slapped their 6-year-old son in the face. She also alleged a 2018 incident in which he grabbed her arm hard enough to bruise it; deputies found a toddler left alone upstairs while he went shopping. He pleaded not guilty and was ordered to complete parenting classes. Authorities have not tied those cases to Saturday’s shooting.
The Times confirmed McKinsey worked there since 2023, rising from senior engineering manager on the games platform, think Connections and other viral puzzles, to director of player experience, leading a team of about 25. Before that, he held roles at Splunk, UKG, Oracle, and even NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He earned a master’s in computer science from UC Berkeley.
Harrowing scene video showed a body in the lot and the elderly couple being loaded into a patrol car. Detectives are still piecing together what happened in the minutes before the shots rang out.
A note on comments: Our advertisers enforce a strict zero-tolerance policy on racism, hate speech, and threats of violence. Any comment that crosses that line will be removed and the account permanently banned — no warnings. Debate hard, but keep it civil.