Candice Jang went to Alameda County court in October 2025 and asked a judge to restrain Jonathan McKinsey, the New York Times Games engineering executive then living apart from her in Dublin, California. She alleged years of domestic violence: a 2018 grab that left bruises on her arm, a later argument in which she said he seized her forearms and dropped her onto a table hard enough to fracture a vertebra, and an October 2025 blow that left a handprint bruise on their six-year-old son’s face after a fight over Legos. She sought protection not only for herself but for the three children and for her mother. Dublin police opened a child-abuse investigation; prosecutors charged McKinsey with two misdemeanor counts; he pleaded not guilty and was released on conditions that included parenting classes. The filing was not a private quarrel. It was the public opening of a custody war that would still be on the calendar when he was killed.

McKinsey answered in December with a restraining-order petition of his own and a divorce filing. He described fifteen years of alleged abuse: his wife beating him with a frying pan in 2013, an attempt to pull medical tubes from his body after a 2010 transition surgery, verbal abuse of the children, and slurs from his mother-in-law—Shili Chen—who, he wrote, called him and one of the boys a “disgusting queer,” a “pervert,” and a “monster” after a dispute over clothing. He also accused his father-in-law, Shouyong Zhang, of punching him in the chest while he recovered from a double mastectomy. Each side painted the other as the danger to the children. By late August 2026 he was still pleading for unsupervised visitation; she was still telling the court the children were not safe in his care. The law, as it so often does in these cases, had become a second battlefield rather than a settlement.

On Saturday, September 26, 2026, Zhang and Chen—both reported as seventy-six or seventy-seven—shot McKinsey in the parking lot of the Dublin Sports Grounds. Authorities arrested them for murder and related charges and have not announced a motive. The court record supplies the context the police have so far declined to supply: a marriage that began in 2011, a transition McKinsey said his in-laws never accepted, competing accusations of violence, and children caught between filings. The claim that the in-laws pulled the trigger because Wordle had grown too hard is a piece of grim satire, not a finding. What the documents actually show is older and colder: a family that had already taken its grievances to court, then took them into a park.

Additional ADNN Articles: 

Trump Slams NYT Treasonous Iran Lies in Billion-Dollar Lawsuit
Trump Slaps New York Times with $15B Defamation Suit, Long Overdue for Biased Smears
USAID Identified As Key Source Of Fake News Propoganda
FakeNews Media Is Co-Conspirator In Obama Sedition Plot