Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen

Introduction

Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen are an elderly California couple, both 77, who are not media figures themselves; their names became publicly known through a single family connection — they are the in-laws of Jonathan McKinsey, a New York Times technology executive. In late September 2026, charging documents alleged, the two killed McKinsey in an ambush-style attack, unloading two guns at him in front of children before trying to flee the scene in a car. They were charged with his murder within days and have since pleaded not guilty — at an October 19 arraignment where their lawyers framed the shooting as fear-driven self-defense and claimed the victim had once hired a hit-man to kill Chen — and an Alameda County judge has since sealed every court filing in their prosecution, including the sealing order itself. The defenses then turned on each other: an October 30 bail filing from Chen’s lawyer claims it was Zhang who fired the fatal shots, while the same motion puts on the record marked-up photographs of McKinsey and Zhang’s own statements to police. The case is at its beginning: everything described here comes from charging documents and police statements as reported in the press, and nothing has been tested at trial.

Background Information

The public record identifies Zhang and Chen almost entirely through McKinsey, who had worked for the Times since 2023 as its head of engineering for games player experience. He had married Candice Jang in 2010; she filed for divorce in 2025, and that year each spouse filed a restraining order against the other, according to the account of the case reported around the couple’s October 19 plea hearing. Court filings described years of family conflict: Chen visited the household in 2023 and allegedly berated McKinsey’s young son for wearing dresses, calling him a “disgusting queer” and a “pervert,” and, when McKinsey begged her to stop, turned her ire to the New York Times employee, who was transgender and transitioned from female to male in 2010, according to the documents. In a separate incident, the father-in-law allegedly punched McKinsey in the chest after he got a double mastectomy, per the documents.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Allegations. Zhang and Chen have been charged but not tried. The account below comes from charging documents and police statements described in news coverage; a charging document is an accusation, not proof, and nearly every act attributed to the couple is framed in those documents as alleged. Both are presumed innocent unless and until a court rules otherwise, and no claim here has been adjudicated. Both have pleaded not guilty, and their defense says the shooting was not a plot but fear of a son-in-law they claim threatened Chen’s life — a defense assertion, not a court finding.

According to those documents, Zhang and Chen allegedly took turns shooting McKinsey in the parking lot of the Dublin Sports Grounds this past Saturday, unloading two guns at him while children were present. The pair then allegedly tried to flee in a Honda Civic; witnesses helped police identify and stop the vehicle, and officers said they used those same witnesses to positively identify the couple before arresting and booking them on suspicion of murder. In a later interview, the documents said, Zhang admitted to killing McKinsey, while Chen invoked her Miranda rights and is recorded as giving no account at all. Prosecutors later said a gun was found in Chen’s possession when police detained the couple as they drove away, that a second firearm found in the car was one Zhang admitted using, and that surveillance video was recovered showing both Chen and Zhang shooting the victim — prosecutors’ account, not adjudicated facts.

The killing itself occurred at what was supposed to be a routine custody exchange: KRON4 reported that McKinsey went to the Dublin Sports Grounds that afternoon for a court-ordered visit with his children, and that just a week earlier he had been due in court to ask a judge for more visitation time. At the October 19 arraignment, both defendants pleaded not guilty; Chen, clutching court papers, was shaking as the pleas were entered with the help of a Mandarin interpreter. Briggs told reporters outside the courthouse that his clients bought their guns in March 2026 because they were scared of McKinsey, that they did not plot or plan his killing, and that McKinsey had threatened Chen’s life on at least three occasions witnessed by others — once, he claimed, through a hired hit-man, and twice more recently by saying he was going to “get rid of” her. The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and Dublin Police have released no suspected motive, and every element of the defense’s account is an untested attorney claim made to reporters, not evidence received in court. Prosecutors added one further detail at the Monday plea hearing: McKinsey was in the lot that afternoon for a supervised visit with his children when he was killed, according to the charging coverage of the hearing.

The co-defendants’ defenses split publicly on October 30, when Chen’s lawyer filed a bail motion claiming it was Zhang who fired the fatal shots. Briggs wrote that Chen watched as her husband fired the deadly shots before she got out of the car “to protect her husband from what she feared was an assault by Mr. McKinsey,” then “walked towards his body and fired several shots into his motionless body as her husband appeared to be doubled over with pain clutching his abdomen” — and argued that the lying-in-wait special circumstance would “be a strain on the facts” against Chen because Zhang “fired so many shots into Mr. McKinsey’s chest and head before Ms. Chen arrived.” The same filing described search-warrant findings from the couple’s one-bedroom apartment that Briggs said convinced police “Zhang had formed an intent to target McKinsey”: four photo albums in which several photos of McKinsey had portions of his face cut out, and one had black marks and dots drawn on his chest and over his right eye — places Briggs noted appeared consistent with where he was later shot — alongside nitrile gloves matching those found at the scene and an empty box for a Sig Sauer pistol; who marked the photographs is unclear.

The filing also put Zhang’s own police statements in the record in detail: per the bail motion, Zhang told investigators McKinsey had a “dark soul,” said he believed McKinsey had engineered two bicycle collisions that injured him in the months before the killing, and admitted shooting him to protect himself and his grandchildren from future harm — “I truly do believe the reason he wants to set me up and harm/kill me because without me, he will have full freedom,” Zhang said, per the filing — while Chen’s team added that Zhang had shown “significant signs of advanced dementia” in the lead-up to the alleged murder. The couple, the motion says, went to the park only at Zhang’s direction, with Chen told to bring a gun “for the purported purposes of going to the shooting range.” Every element of the bail filing is defense advocacy seeking Chen’s release, not a court finding, and prosecutors’ response is not yet public.

The family conflict the filings describe ran deeper than the 2023 incidents. In a December 2025 court declaration reviewed by the California Post, McKinsey wrote that he carried a pregnancy in 2014 — as a transgender man, using an embryo from his wife’s IVF treatment — and alleged that his estranged wife, Candice Jang, forced him to move heavy boxes during a 2015 move, after which he began bleeding and their son, Romeo Preston McKinsey, was born prematurely and survived less than an hour. “I am confident that being forced to move the heavy boxes triggered my premature labor and ultimately caused the death of our son,” he said in the declaration, which also alleged that during the pregnancy Jang regularly started fights out of jealousy, forced him to sleep on a futon, and once threw a cup that struck his stomach. The declaration is McKinsey’s account, made in litigation with Jang, not an adjudicated finding; it names Jang, not the couple this page covers, and it is part of this case’s public record because both sides’ filings have been widely reported. A later filing from Jang’s side, an August 2026 custody declaration reported in coverage around the plea hearing, gave her own picture of the household: “During our marriage, the children and I learned to avoid provoking Jonathan lest he became angry. In my experience, appearing agreeable or happy around him was sometimes a means of avoiding his anger,” she wrote, per the report; court documents also recorded that McKinsey had given his children a book about a young girl whose mother died. The declaration is again Jang’s account in the custody litigation — reported, not adjudicated — and concerns McKinsey rather than the defendants this page covers, though it is the record the defense cites in arguing the family’s fear of him.

Public Reaction and Consequences

Attention to the case has centered on its unusual cast — a couple both aged 77 accused of gunning down a New York Times executive — and on the family history the filings describe. A Times spokesman confirmed that McKinsey was the victim of the attack and had worked for the newspaper since 2023. The documented consequences so far are the couple’s arrest and booking on suspicion of murder, the filing of a complaint charging murder with a lying-in-wait special circumstance and a long list of firearm and injury enhancements, and a court order holding both without bail at Santa Rita Jail. At their first court appearance at the East County Hall of Justice, both required Mandarin interpreters; Chen said through an interpreter that she could not afford an attorney and was appointed one, while Zhang appeared flanked by his appointed lawyer and did not speak.

The defense posture has taken shape since. Chen’s court-appointed attorney, Curtis Briggs, told the court she plans to plead not guilty and to center her defense on abuse he alleged the victim perpetrated, saying the documents he reviewed “raised concerns that McKinsey was rageful and could not control his temper” and that “Mr. McKinsey was extremely violent and dangerous to his family” — a defense claim, not a court finding. Zhang’s public defender, Jennie Otis, asked that he be medically evaluated without saying why. The Associated Press reported that McKinsey himself had been charged in October 2025 with misdemeanor child abuse and child endangerment, to which he pleaded not guilty, and was out on bail awaiting a mental-health diversion attempt when he was killed — the record Chen’s defense is expected to lean on. By the October 19 arraignment that defense posture had expanded into a claimed motive: Briggs asserted that McKinsey had once hired a hit-man to kill his mother-in-law and described Chen as “essentially a live-in nanny for the family” who armed herself because she feared him, according to KRON4 — claims on which prosecutors have not publicly commented.

Chen’s bail bid also put the jail holding her on the record. Briggs argued she suffers high blood pressure and blood-sugar problems, that five people have reportedly died at Santa Rita Jail since the beginning of this year, and that “for Ms. Chen, detention before trial may become a death sentence without a conviction” — offering as the alternative home detention with GPS monitoring at her daughter’s home, the same Candice Jang who was going through the contentious divorce and custody proceedings with McKinsey before the killing.

The prosecution itself then receded behind closed doors. As first reported by the Bay Area News Group on October 14, an Alameda County judge has sealed every court filing in the case — the criminal complaint, the police probable-cause declarations, every minute order — and sealed the sealing order too, leaving even the judge’s name a secret. First Amendment experts condemned the move: Matthew Cate, a lawyer specializing in public-access cases, said “that’s not supposed to happen that way” and “I can’t imagine what would justify sealing an entire case file,” while David Loy of the First Amendment Coalition called the blanket sealing “egregious” and its application to the order itself “even more egregious,” since the public cannot judge whether the sealing is valid or whether the judge has a conflict of interest. The New York Post’s own account of the sealing, published October 18, said the move “sparked outrage among First Amendment experts, who say the decision appears to violate laws guaranteeing public access to court proceedings.”

Current Status

As of the October 30, 2026 record, Zhang and Chen remain jailed without bail at Santa Rita Jail, charged with McKinsey’s murder — described in charging coverage as premeditated first-degree murder — along with the lying-in-wait special circumstance and the accompanying firearm and injury allegations. Both pleaded not guilty at the October 19 arraignment; a bail hearing is set for November 4, to be followed by a pretrial hearing on November 23, and Chen is asking to await it on home detention with GPS monitoring. Every court filing in the prosecution is now sealed by an order whose own text and author’s name are also sealed, so the criminal complaint and police declarations are public only in the versions the District Attorney’s office released to reporters on charging day; the couple’s separate divorce file, by contrast, remains open, and the sealing order does not appear to bar public access to future court hearings. The investigation has widened beyond the couple: three days after the shooting, Dublin police executed a search warrant at the home of McKinsey’s estranged wife, Candice Jang — the defendants’ daughter — seizing items including her vehicle and phone; police have not said what was taken or whether Jang is considered a person of interest, and she has not been charged with any crime. No trial date has been reported.

Impact on Their Career/Life

For two 77-year-olds with no previous public profile, the charges are life-defining: each now faces a murder prosecution carrying a possible sentence of life without parole, and both names are permanently attached in coverage to the killing. The shooting also capped the destruction of a family already fractured by litigation: McKinsey had been in a divorce and custody fight with his wife, Candice Jang, and had three children under 10 with her — and the two people charged with killing him are their own close relatives, while the December 2025 declarations add a still earlier loss, the death of McKinsey’s infant son Romeo, to the record the family’s disputes have left behind. The case has drawn scrutiny far beyond the Bay Area — reporting on it has reached outlets as distant as China — and its blanket sealing has made it a First Amendment test case in its own right, with open-government lawyers warning that courts have overturned sealing orders in equally inflammatory prosecutions.

Sources

• New York Post, “Trans New York Times exec was murdered by in-laws during supervised visit with his kids: prosecutors,” October 20, 2026 — source
• @nypost trigger tweet, October 20, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “NYT exec hired ‘hitman’ to kill mother-in-law before alleged execution: attorney,” October 19, 2026 — source
• KRON4, “Possible motive uncovered for Dublin couple accused of murdering son-in-law in park,” October 19, 2026 — source
• *New York Post, “NYT exec’s in-laws charged after fatal shooting at California park” — source
• *New York Post, “Police seize evidence from wife of slain New York Times exec” — source
• *New York Post, “NYT exec allegedly murdered by in-laws was pregnant, had miscarriage” — source
• *New York Post, “Alameda judge seals every file related to New York Times’ exec Jonathan McKinsey’s killing” — source
• *The Mercury News, “Alameda County judge cuts off Dublin murder case from public view” — source
• *The Press Democrat (AP), “Attorney says woman will plead not guilty in killing of son-in-law at Dublin park” — source
• Livermore Vine, “Details emerge in Dublin shooting of NYT employee as in-laws appear in court” — source
• New York Post, “Grandma accused of shooting NYT exec son-in-law says husband fired deadly shots,” October 30, 2026 — source
• NBC News, “Elderly couple pleads not guilty to killing NYT executive son-in-law at California park,” October 2026 — source
• @nypost trigger tweet (bail filing), October 30, 2026 — source