A father’s poignant message to his son (who “transitioned” from a woman to a man and identified as transgender), days before he was gunned down in a California parking lot by his in-laws has been disclosed.
William Finney II, the father of New York Times tech exec Jonathan McKinsey, begged his son to return home and visit his family 18 days prior to the day that Dublin, Calif., police found McKinsey dead in a parking lot. His in-laws, Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, are both accused of shooting him.
McKinsey’s father also wrote about the continuing strife between McKinsey and his wife, Candice Jang. The couple had three children and were undergoing a bitter divorce that saw both sides file restraining orders against each other.
“Jon, hope everything is going well,” Finney wrote on Sept. 8. “Hope you can visit us when you have some free time. Mom and Dad love you so much and miss you. Hope everything goes well with you and Candice and the kids.”
According to the New York Post, Finney was responding to a new profile picture McKinsey posted on Sept. 7. McKinsey was formerly Dawn Finney before he transitioned from female to male in 2010. He married Jang in 2011.
According to a story by Newsmax, witnesses claim that Chen and Zhang took turns shooting McKinsey on the afternoon of Sept. 26 in broad daylight. Dublin police arrested and booked the pair into Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of murder.
Under suspicion of murder, Zhang and Chen are being held without bail, willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence, conspiracy, and child endangerment likely to cause great bodily injury or death.
A 77-year-old California couple is accused of fatally shooting their son-in-law in a busy sports complex parking lot, according to police. @CBSMattGutman reports. pic.twitter.com/80nZdTeQva
— CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil (@CBSEveningNews) September 28, 2026
Zhang and Chen are scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday. It was not clear whether they had attorneys. McKinsey was director of engineering for The New York Times Games department, a company spokesman said.
According to his LinkedIn profile, McKinsey joined the newspaper in 2023 after working for several technology companies, including Splunk, Coursera, and Oracle. In a December 2025 restraining order filing, he said that his wife and in-laws had abused him because of his identity.
McKinsey contended that his mother-in-law called him and one of his sons a “pervert” and a “monster” after the child tried on dresses. He also accused his father-in-law of punching him in the chest while he was recovering from double mastectomy surgery in 2010.
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