DUBLIN, Calif. — In reams of documents in family court, the couple traded terrible allegations in an acrid divorce battle with one inarguable fact: They had long been living a domestic nightmare.
Jonathan McKinsey claimed that his wife of 15 years, Candice Jang, exercised “complete control” over him and once bullied him into eating a dead cockroach. He said that Jang’s mother ridiculed him for being transgender and blamed him when one of their small sons went through a phase of trying on girls’ clothes.
Jang claimed that McKinsey fractured a vertebra in her spine and severely struck one of the boys.
Their rancorous court fight came to an abrupt end Sept. 26 when McKinsey, director of engineering for the New York Times games department, was gunned down midafternoon in the parking lot of a playground where he spent visitation time with his three young children.
On Thursday, Jang’s parents peered through courtroom glass from the defendants’ dock — charged with murder.
“Tiny, frail, elderly people,” as one of their lawyers put it, they stood side by side, listening through earpieces to Chinese-language interpreters.
Prosecutors in this affluent suburb east of Oakland portrayed a calculated, brazen homicide. Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang are accused of “lying in wait” for McKinsey before shooting him multiple times.
Curtis L. Briggs, the court-appointed attorney for Chen, described the couple to reporters as “two elderly grandparents who love each other very much.” Briggs said his client will plead not guilty. The public defenders office representing Zhang declined to comment.
Authorities haven’t publicly cited a motive. Jang, 46, has not been implicated in the shooting.
In Alameda County Superior Court, hundreds of pages of documents filed by McKinsey and his wife, including mutual complaints of domestic violence, paint a bleak picture of family dissolution.
Jang said her mother, who helped watch the children, experienced “emotional abuse” from McKinsey, while McKinsey said his mother-in-law attacked his gender identity.
In 2023, when his and Jang’s then-4-year-old son “went through a phase where he wanted to wear [his sister’s] dresses,” Chen “continuously called [the son] a monster, a ‘disgusting queer’ and ‘a pervert’ because of this,” McKinsey told a judge in writing. He said his mother-in-law “called me the same names. She blamed me for [the boy] wanting to wear his sister’s dresses.”
In 2010, when McKinsey was receiving gender transition care, “Candice’s father physically assaulted me by punching me in the chest while I was still recovering from my double mastectomy surgery,” he said in a court filing late last year.
Jang and McKinsey’s relationship was turbulent from the start.
In the two years after they met in 2008, McKinsey tried twice to commit suicide, according to court documents. Jang said the attempts came after she tried to end the relationship. McKinsey said Jang told him he should kill himself because “no one would want to be with someone as ‘f—ed up and transgender’” as him.
Their arguing quickly grew violent, by both of their accounts. Jang said McKinsey grabbed her arm during a disagreement and caused her to hit her back on the corner of a coffee table, fracturing a vertebra. He also threatened to kill her and her parents, she wrote in court documents.
McKinsey accused Jang of outlandish cruelty. During one argument, he alleged, she hit him in the head with a frying pan and threatened to keep going unless he ate a dead cockroach she found on the ground. He said he ate the bug to make her stop. He also accused her of almost killing their cat by trapping it in a bucket of water as punishment.
He said Jang grew jealous, at one point falsely accusing him of having an affair and hitting him in the head with a mirror. When he grabbed the mirror to stop her, it broke, cutting a nerve and tendon in his thumb, he said.
Still, they stayed together. In 2014, McKinsey — then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley — got pregnant.
But the baby lived less than an hour, McKinsey recounted in court documents — a loss he would later blame on Jang making him move heavy boxes during their move to San Jose.
They argued constantly.
“I hope you drop dead,” Jang said McKinsey told her in 2020.
“I hope you die,” Jang allegedly told McKinsey in another dispute.
Then, last October, Jang said McKinsey hit one of their sons while the kids were fighting over Lego blocks, leaving a large bruise the shape of a handprint. McKinsey was charged with corporal injury to a child and endangering another child’s health after a police deputy found him alone in the home without supervision.
Soon, Jang got a temporary restraining order against her husband that ordered him to move out of their Dublin townhouse and gave her sole custody of their children — then 2, 4 and 6.
McKinsey responded with his own request for a restraining order. He also asked for a divorce.
“I truly believe that [Jang] would hurt or even kill them if she believed there was any possibility of me having the children in my custody and care,” he wrote in his filing.
McKinsey spent his last nine months fighting in court for more time with his children, limited at first to just one hour of supervised visitation each week. He told the court about his months of “Parenting Without Violence” classes and quoted from the supervisory reports documenting his time with the kids.
“Several visits included the children telling dad they loved him, asking him to carry or hold them,” one report read. McKinsey underlined the words for emphasis.
The two misdemeanor charges against McKinsey were still pending when he was shot in the parking lot of Dublin Sports Grounds. He was found lying behind an open car trunk, according to video shared with the San Francisco Chronicle and witnesses, who said the shooters calmly walked away.
Bystanders pointed out the assailants to a patrol sergeant as they were leaving the parking lot in a black Honda Civic, according to an affidavit described by the Chronicle.
Police said they apprehended Jang’s parents within minutes, Chen at the wheel and carrying a gun, the affidavit says. A search of the vehicle turned up a second gun.
Authorities have released little information about the killing, and the defendants’ case files are sealed.
Under California law, “lying in wait” is a “special circumstance” in a first-degree murder case, making the crime punishable by life in prison without parole. Chen and Zhang, both charged with that offense, are being held without bail.
Outside the courthouse Thursday, Briggs, the court-appointed attorney for Chen, said court documents suggest to him that McKinsey was “extremely rageful” and “could not control his temper.”
“So we are mostly focused on the full context of who Mr. McKinsey was,” Briggs said, “and what he was doing to act out these acts of violence and essentially rain hell on his family for years.”
“Are you blaming the victim?” a reporter asked.
“Not yet,” the attorney replied, but “that may be what happens.”
McKinsey confided about his child-custody fight with members of the church he began attending in recent years.
Eventually, he enlisted some of his fellow congregants to provide supervision when he spent time with his daughter and sons.
Bette Felton was among those he asked, and she was happy to do it.
In an interview, she recalled sitting with a book by a playground at Dublin Sports Grounds, looking up every so often as McKinsey chased after his children. With three little ones to look after, she recalled, “he was really running around.”
She knew him as a “gentle” person, as a church volunteer whom she and her husband peppered with questions about the Times’s games, which they loved playing.
“I never once heard him talk with any animosity about anybody,” Felton said. “It was just how much he wanted to see his kids.”
Now she thinks of those kids playing in the park and what they face.
“That’s what hurts your heart more than anything,” Felton said. “Those dear children.”
Razzan Nakhlawi in Washington contributed to this report.
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