Jonathan McKinsey, a 40-year-old New York Times engineering executive, was shot dead in the parking lot of a sports complex in Dublin, Calif., around 3 p.m. Saturday, allegedly by his wife’s 77-year-old parents, police said.
McKinsey, the newspaper’s head of engineering for games player experience, was found by officers patrolling near Dublin Sports Grounds, his body riddled with gunshot wounds, as emergency dispatchers began fielding a flood of 911 calls. First responders tried to save him. He died at the scene.
Witnesses described two masked assailants walking up to McKinsey in the parking lot and taking turns firing into him before a passing officer arrested them. Video from the scene showed a body lying in the lot in broad daylight, and a couple being loaded into the back of a police car.
In-Laws Booked on Murder Charges
The suspects were identified as Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, who were booked into Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of murder. Zhang stands 5 feet 8 and weighs 165 pounds, while Chen measures just 5 feet 2 and weighs 110 pounds, according to Alameda County Sheriff’s Office inmate records. The couple is from the Dublin area but also has ties to Albuquerque, N.M.
Booking records show the pair faces charges including first-degree murder, felony conspiracy, dangerously firing a gun and child endangerment that could have caused major injury or death.
McKinsey was married to the couple’s daughter, Candice Jang. Court documents describe a bitter fight between McKinsey and his in-laws over being transgender, and state that his wife tried to pull medical tubes out of his body.
From NASA to Times Games
A spokesman for the Times confirmed that McKinsey was the victim of the attack and that he had worked for the newspaper since 2023.
His career in technology spanned nearly two decades. It began in the late 2000s with hands-on software engineering jobs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle, along with a stint in product strategy at Coursera. He earned a master’s degree in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2015. By 2018 he had moved into engineering management at UKG, then climbed through leadership roles at Splunk.
McKinsey joined the Times in early 2023 as a senior engineering manager for the games platform, where he oversaw the infrastructure behind viral hits such as Connections and scaled systems to absorb enormous traffic surges. In late 2025 he stepped up to director of engineering for games player experience, leading a 25-person team responsible for feature innovation and monetization for millions of daily puzzle players.
It is a corner of the paper that has become one of its most visible — the daily rituals of readers who open a puzzle before they open the news. The engineering leader who kept those games running was killed in a suburban parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, in front of enough witnesses that the calls to 911 overlapped.
A Tribute on LinkedIn
Word of the killing spread quickly through the technology industry, where McKinsey had spent his entire working life. Former colleagues and acquaintances gathered in the comments beneath his professional profile. “Rip buddy,” wrote Nathan Wu, who says on LinkedIn that he worked at UC Berkeley.
Zhang and Chen, who were taken into custody within moments of the shooting, were held at Santa Rita Jail after their arrests on suspicion of murder. Booking records for the elderly couple list first-degree murder among the counts against them.