Jonathan McKinsey, an engineer who worked in the games department for The New York Times, was fatally shot Saturday in a San Francisco suburb. The police have accused his parents-in-law, both 76.

A Bay Area couple have been accused of shooting and killing their son-in-law in a suburban sports park on Saturday afternoon, the local police said.

The man, Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds around 3 p.m. in a parking lot at Dublin Sports Grounds, an athletic complex and playground in Dublin, Calif., about 35 miles east of downtown San Francisco, according to Dublin Police Services.

Mr. McKinsey was director of engineering for the games department of The New York Times, according to a company spokesman. Before Mr. McKinsey began working at The Times in 2023, he worked for several tech companies including Splunk, Coursera and Oracle, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The authorities arrested Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 76, in the shooting. They are a married couple who live in Dublin and are the parents of Mr. McKinsey’s wife, the police said.

No motive was described by the police for the shooting, but Mr. McKinsey and his wife had a turbulent marriage and were living separately, records show. Each had filed requests for domestic violence restraining orders against the other last year in Alameda County. Mr. McKinsey had also pleaded not guilty last year to two charges of misdemeanor child abuse.

Mr. McKinsey was a transgender man and accused his wife, Candice Jang, and his in-laws of abusing him because of his identity, according to his filing for a restraining order in December 2025. He said his mother-in-law called him and one of his sons a “pervert” and a “monster” after the boy tried on dresses, and he accused his father-in-law of punching him in the chest while he was recovering from double mastectomy surgery in 2010.

In her October 2025 filing, Ms. Jang said that Mr. McKinsey had grabbed her by the forearms during one argument and dropped her onto the corner of a table, fracturing vertebra in her upper back. Ms. Jang also accused Mr. McKinsey of emotionally abusing her mother.

Efforts to reach Ms. Jang and her lawyer on Monday were unsuccessful.

Assad Razawi, a resident of Dublin, said he was outside a grocery store near his car on Saturday at around 3 p.m. on Saturday when he heard what sounded like five or six gunshots coming from the sports park across the street. When he looked over, he said he saw a man drop to the ground in the parking lot and another man and woman walking calmly away from the scene. The San Francisco Chronicle was first to report Mr. Razawi’s account.

Around the same time, a Dublin police sergeant was driving by the park when he saw a man lying on the ground and stopped to investigate, the local police said. Emergency personnel began arriving after receiving 911 calls from people in the park about the shooting.

Witnesses directed officers to two individuals standing nearby, whom police identified as Mr. Zhang and Ms. Chen. They are being held without the possibility of bail on suspicion of murder, and detectives are continuing to investigate. They also are being held on suspicion of willful discharge of a firearm with gross negligence; conspiracy; and child endangerment likely to produce great bodily injury or death. It was not clear which children the last booking charge pertained to.

They are scheduled to be arraigned on Wednesday. It was unclear whether Mr. Zhang and Ms. Chen had legal representation.

A report from the Dublin Police Services noted that on Oct. 17, 2025, an officer met with Ms. Jang, who said that her husband had struck their 6-year-old “in the face with an open hand.” When officers went to the residence to contact Mr. McKinsey, they discovered a 2-year-old child in an upstairs bedroom who had been left without supervision. The officers say that Mr. McKinsey had left the child alone for over an hour while he went shopping.

Mr. McKinsey was later charged in Alameda County Superior Court with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse in connection with the separate incidents. He had pleaded not guilty to both charges and was released from jail on the condition that he complete 12 parenting classes. A pretrial hearing had been scheduled for next month.

In December, Mr. McKinsey filed his own request for a temporary restraining order against his wife, citing years of domestic violence. According to his filing, his wife had recently been granted full custody of the children, and he feared for their safety. That same month, he filed for divorce.

Mr. McKinsey said that he had been framed for the October incident in which the couple’s 2-year-old son was found alone. He said that Ms. Jang was responsible for the children during the workweek and that she had not told him before leaving that the child was sleeping in his crib upstairs. “She did this on purpose, to set me up,” he wrote.

In his filing, he accused his wife of regularly abusing their children and neglecting to properly bathe and feed them.

“When I protested about any of this, she threatened me with harm or said she would call the police and tell them I was hurting our children,” he said in the filing.

He said that Ms. Jang had once hit him on the head with a frying pan and forced him to ingest a cockroach. He accused her, on another occasion, of striking him on the head with a mirror, which shattered as he tried to wrest it from her control and severed a tendon and nerve in his hand, requiring surgery and leaving him with a permanent loss of sensation in his thumb.

Kitty Bennett and Georgia Gee contributed research. Coral Murphy Marcos contributed reporting from Hayward, Calif.