Slain NY Times exec was PREGNANT but lost baby after wife’s attack, he claimed: Roach-eating and cat-drowning allegations revealed in chilling new trove of filings

There are no flowers, wreaths or candles where New York Times executive Jonathan McKinsey was gunned down in broad daylight on September 26.

Only subtle signs remain: pocks in the pavement where bullets slammed downward as the 40-year-old father of three lay dying, and water stains where the city hosed away his blood, yards from a busy ballfield and playground.

Three miles away, his in-laws, Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, sit in jail without bond, each charged with his murder. 

A plea hearing is expected to take place October 19. Chen’s attorney said she plans to plead not guilty, while Zhang’s plans have not yet been made public.

Authorities say the Mandarin-speaking grandparents were ‘lying in wait’ before opening fire on the trans man their daughter, 46-year-old Candice Jang, married 15 years ago and had been fighting with ever since.

The Daily Mail combed through more than 800 pages of court records to piece together the couple’s hellish relationship and bitter separation, and the allegations in this story are all from those documents.

The filings contain conflicting accounts, but they show why each indicated that they feared ‘for their own safety and their kids,’ and why each won a temporary restraining order against the other.

The allegations are staggering. McKinsey claimed Jang physically and emotionally abused him throughout their 15-year marriage, including while McKinsey was pregnant with one of their children – a baby boy who was born prematurely and died just an hour after birth. 

McKinsey also claimed his wife once forced him to eat a cockroach and tried to drown their cat.

He also claimed he lost feeling in his thumb after a struggle left a tendon severed. Jang, meanwhile, accused him of breaking one of her backbones.

But there are holes in the story, and locals are left wondering who, if either, deserves sympathy. 

Was it McKinsey, the allegedly hot-headed husband charged last year with hitting his then-six-year-old son and leaving his two-year-old home alone? Or Jang, the stay-at-home wife he called a ‘practiced liar’ and accused of years of vicious abuse and of setting him up to lose custody?

Then there are the grandparents. 

McKinsey told the court that mother-in-law Chen hurled transphobic insults at him and that Zhang punched him in the chest while he was recovering from a double mastectomy. 

But nothing in the records explains why an elderly couple would allegedly turn a family feud into an execution.

‘Why the grandparents ventured into it, I don’t know,’ said Philip Schnayerson, a local lawyer who briefly defended McKinsey on two child-related misdemeanors. 

‘There are so many facets of this case that people, including me, don’t understand.’

‘It’s hard to know what to think or who to feel sorry for,’ added neighbor Nickah Murray. 

‘That’s why there are no wreaths in memory of Jonathan. No one wants to jump to conclusions about who was the bad guy in that home.’

How it began 

Jonathan Clint McKinsey was born Dawn Finney, a girl, to a Georgia family he appears to have drifted from. They did not return calls for this story.

Around his 40th birthday last month, his father, William Finney II, posted a Facebook plea, according to news reports: ‘Mom and Dad love you so much and miss you. Hope everything goes well with you and Candice and the kids.’

McKinsey earned a computer science degree from Georgia Tech in 2010 and a master’s from UC Berkeley in 2015. 

He joined the Times in 2023 as a games-platform engineer and was promoted last year to director, overseeing 25 people who keep online crosswords and Wordle running. Court records indicate he worked from home.

Jang appears to have been raised in New Mexico, according to public records.

A LinkedIn profile under the name ‘Candice J’ says she attended Carnegie Mellon University and worked as an IT analyst at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where, as SFGate first reported, her tenure overlapped with his internship in July 2008, when court records show the pair got together.

He had begun transitioning and calling himself ‘Jon.’ Even as a full-time grad student, he supported her financially. 

Jang told the court she hasn’t held a job since 2010, though her LinkedIn says she has been a self-employed product manager since 2011.

They married in 2011 despite early troubles, court filings show. 

Horrifying accusations 

Jang told the family court that in 2010 that McKinsey ‘grabbed me by my forearms during an argument and dropped me, causing me to hit my back on a coffee table corner, fracturing an upper vertebrae.’

McKinsey said in his version of events that his wife ‘regularly kicked me out of our shared home’ until he found a job. 

In February 2010, he told the court, she said he should kill himself because no one would want someone ‘f***ed up and transgender.’ 

He said he attempted suicide as a result, and called 911 before blacking out.

In December of that year, while McKinsey was recovering from a double mastectomy in Florida, Jang flew into a rage because he was too weak to go sightseeing, he claimed in a legal filing.

‘When I told her that I needed to rest she called me lazy, and then grabbed one of the drainage tubes and tried to pull it out,’ he said.

He also alleged: 

• During an incident in 2012, Jang punished her cat for refusing a collar by putting its head in a bucket of soapy water and covering it with a lid. After he revived the animal, ‘Candice was completely unapologetic and said the cat deserved it,’ he reported.
• In 2013, she hit him on the head with a frying pan and threatened to keep going unless he ate a dead cockroach. He ate the bug to make peace with his wife.
• During his pregnancy (the couple used IVF, with McKinsey carrying the embryo), she threw a cup that struck his stomach and made him carry heavy boxes at five months. He bled and delivered prematurely. Their son, Romeo Preston McKinsey, was born alive but died an hour later, records show. After another pregnancy in 2017, he said, she blamed his ‘f***ed up genetics’ for a miscarriage.
• She forced him off Facebook by throwing pots and pans, deleted his female LinkedIn contacts in 2017, and falsely accused him of an affair with a coworker.
• That same year, he said, she hit him on the head with a mirror. It shattered in the struggle and sliced his right thumb, severing part of a tendon and nerve. He needed surgery and six months of therapy, and part of the thumb remained numb.

McKinsey said he eventually left his job for one with fewer women because he was ‘so fearful of Candice and her unreasonable jealousy.’ 

He also told the court that he suspected she sent messages in his name telling friends to stay away, so he devised a code word to prove future emails were really his.

Jang tells it differently. She said he refused her time-outs during arguments, bruised her left forearm in 2018, and told her in 2020: ‘I hope you drop dead. I hate you so much.’ 

By 2021, she claimed, she was ‘sleeping with a pair of scissors near my bed for self-protection.’

The children become part of the war 

The couple went to marriage counseling and long slept in separate rooms. Still, despite their obviously unresolved differences, they had three children, now seven, five and three, whom the Daily Mail is not naming. 

It is unclear which of the parents the children are genetically related to and who carried them. One court record refers to McKinsey paying a surrogate, and neighbors say they never saw either parent pregnant.

‘They seemed kind of isolated,’ a neighbor on the same block of townhouses told us. Murray, who lives around the corner, said of Jang: ‘She doesn’t have a lot of friends here.’

Each accused the other of turning their temper on the kids.

Jang submitted a two-page log of allegations against McKinsey, including that he pushed the children and on one occasion ‘flicked my daughter in the forehead for crying.’ But the log appears to clash with 2025 paperwork from the kids’ pediatrician in which she reported no ‘safety concerns’ at home.

McKinsey alleged that she screamed at and hit the children and once called their daughter a ‘little b***h.’

He said she tried to slam their oldest son’s finger in a door after he accidentally did so to his younger brother, and that she threatened to beat their then-two-year-old daughter until she said she loved her.

He also alleged that Chen, who often helped care for the kids, called their eldest son a ‘monster,’ a ‘disgusting queer’ and a ‘pervert’ during a phase when he wanted to wear his sister’s dresses, and hit the boy in the back of the head. 

When McKinsey intervened, he said, Chen ‘turned her disgust toward me’ and told him to get out of ‘her house,’ which he owned. He said Jang refused his request for outside childcare.

He further alleged that she called their eldest son ‘stupid’ over his homework and defended it by saying ‘he is.’

His arrest 

McKinsey admitted hitting their eldest son on the left side of the face in frustration last October after the boy mistreated a sibling. Jang reported him to police. 

He was arrested for child abuse and, because officers found their two-year-old home alone in his crib, child endangerment.

Jang told officers McKinsey was supposed to be watching the toddler. McKinsey said she was in charge while he worked and framed him. 

‘I firmly believe she did this on purpose, to set me up,’ he wrote. 

He cited at least seven dates when she allegedly left the kids home alone, sometimes for up to three hours, and claimed she installed a lock at the top of their daughter’s door to keep her locked inside when Jang left the kids home alone.

The two misdemeanor charges against McKinsey were still pending a year later. He had pleaded not guilty, and was due in court on them days after he was killed.

A bitter court battle for their children

After the arrest, Jang kicked him out and won a restraining order and sole custody. 

‘I and the children have all experienced physical, verbal, emotional abuse from Jonathan,’ she wrote, also alleging that he emotionally abused her mother.

McKinsey rented a studio and listed a Pleasanton P.O. box as his address. He started therapy and completed 56 sessions of two parenting courses, one court-ordered. The organizer called him ‘a leader in the class.’

He won his own restraining order in December and one-hour supervised weekly visits. 

Supervisors observed that the children seemed comfortable and loving with him. 

‘The kids appear to give dad plenty of hugs,’ one wrote. 

They also noted that ‘mom seems to present concerns that are not warranted’ after Jang reported an unexplained arm injury on their youngest.

Jang, who received $5,175 a month in child support and lived in a home McKinsey paid the mortgage on, fought his efforts to see the kids more often. 

She told the court that a book he supposedly gave their daughter about a girl mourning her mother was ‘deeply disturbing and frightening’ given his alleged threats to kill her and her parents. He denied giving the book. 

He accused her of poisoning the children against him, including telling their daughter he has ‘cooties’ because of his herpes diagnosis. 

Jang denied it and suggested the kids might be faking happiness around him as a ‘learned response.’

But reassured by the supervisors’ reports, the family court judge steadily increased McKinsey’s visits. 

Starting August 29, McKinsey was granted two unsupervised two-hour stints a week in public places like a library or playground, pending a custody evaluation.

The killing 

Dublin police and prosecutors won’t say why McKinsey was in the lot where he died that Saturday afternoon. 

But his car was parked steps from the playground and near the library, an area crowded with kids and families.

Neighbors believe he had just handed his children back to Jang before he was gunned down behind his car.

Authorities allege Zhang and Chen were ‘lying in wait.’ Under California law, that’s a special kind of premeditation that carries life without parole if proven. 

Investigators claim that surveillance footage shows the couple shooting ‘in concert,’ even after McKinsey fell face-up on the pavement. The footage has not been released.

Police say the couple lingered in the lot for several minutes. After witnesses pointed officers to their black Honda Civic, they say Chen was driving with a gun on her while Zhang rode in the passenger seat. 

A second gun was found in the car, which police say Zhang admitted using to shoot his son-in-law. Chen invoked her Miranda rights.

Where the grandparents were living is unclear. Public records list a P.O. box in Albuquerque for Zhang, who owned two small trading companies, and one near Jang’s home in California for Chen, who was licensed as a massage therapist in New Mexico until 2015. 

Neighbors didn’t know if they lived with Jang but often saw them walking the kids through their Courtyards neighborhood in Dublin Ranch.

‘They were just always there… fixtures in the neighborhood,’ said Murray. ‘I thought they were very staunch kind of old people who didn’t bother themselves with anybody else.’

Born on the same day in 1949, Chen and Zhang marked their 77th birthdays in jail last Wednesday, the day prosecutors announced the murder charges against them.

They appeared behind thick glass in a Dublin courtroom that day and Thursday, speaking quietly through a Mandarin interpreter. 

He wore standard orange and she a dark green garment resembling a suicide-prevention vest.

McKinsey had alleged in court documents that Jang once ‘convinced her mother to attempt suicide which resulted in her mother being hospitalized.’

Chen’s county-paid lawyer, Curtis Briggs, called her a frail grandmother who will plead not guilty based on alleged abuse by McKinsey. 

After meeting her only briefly that morning, Briggs described her slain son-in-law as ‘extremely violent, volatile and rageful’ with a ‘reputation of terrorizing his family.’

Zhang’s public defender asked for a medical evaluation of his client.

The arrests have rattled a city where almost 15% of the population are Chinese. Two Chinese-born community leaders, who asked not to be named, said they didn’t know the couple. ‘We do what we need to keep our families safe,’ one told us.

Schnayerson noted that Alameda County has a family law courtroom specially designed to separate feuding parents and keep kids out of earshot of their accusations. 

‘Anger and crimes of passion can obviously get heightened in family court situations,’ he said.

Susan Schwartz, a domestic violence and family-law professor at New England Law, pointed to ‘a sense of desperation that some parents feel about the prospect of losing some or all custody.’ 

She knows of no research about why grandparents might get involved. ‘They can be a source of support or can add to the conflict. I don’t think there’s a certain pattern.’ No matter how many pages parents file, she added: ‘That doesn’t necessarily tell you what actually went on day to day in people’s lives.’

Police raided Jang’s house last week, towing her car and carrying out boxes of electronics and papers. 

The next day, she walked her neighborhood in a red-star cap evocative of Mao-era China and declined to comment on the killing.

As she and a female companion hustled her three kids home, her three-year-old bolted from his stroller and ran toward our reporters. 

Jang grabbed him, shoved him inside and slammed the door behind him.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 988.