Jonathan McKinsey, a transgender the outlet executive allegedly killed by his in-laws last September, once carried a pregnancy that ended in tragedy, with court documents revealing he blamed his estranged wife Candice Jang for the loss.
McKinsey, 40, was fatally shot on Sept. 26 in the parking lot of Dublin Sports Ground in the Bay Area, according to authorities. His in-laws, Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, were charged with murder and remain jailed without bail. They face possible life without parole if convicted.
In a December 2025 court filing, McKinsey described a pregnancy more than a decade earlier that he said was marred by Jang’s cruelty. The embryo had been created from Jang’s IVF treatment, though McKinsey had initially proposed using his own eggs. Jang allegedly rejected the idea, telling him she didn’t want a child with his “f—ed up genetics,” McKinsey stated in court documents.
At the time, in November 2014, McKinsey was a full-time graduate student at UC Berkeley working part-time as a teaching assistant.
“While I was pregnant, Candice regularly started fights with me because she was jealous that I was carrying the baby,” McKinsey alleged in his declaration.
“She forced me to sleep on the futon in our living room, while she slept in the bed. On one occasion, she threw a cup at me and hit me in my stomach.”
The couple relocated to San Jose in early 2015. McKinsey was 22 weeks pregnant when he began experiencing severe nausea during the move. He claimed Jang forced him to lift heavy boxes despite their hired movers.
“Once the move was completed, I noticed that I had started bleeding,” he wrote in the filing.
McKinsey said Jang’s verbal abuse continued as he sought medical attention. “While Candice drove me to the emergency room, she screamed at me repeatedly and told me to ‘shut up,’ when I expressed I was in pain,” he alleged.
Their son, Romeo Preston McKinsey, was born but survived less than an hour, according to court documents.
“I am confident that being forced to move the heavy boxes triggered my premature labor and ultimately caused the death of our son,” McKinsey stated.
McKinsey’s court filings also described an earlier alleged assault from August 2013. He claimed Jang struck him with a frying pan during an argument and threatened continued violence unless he complied with a degrading demand.
“…she hit me in the head with a frying pan. She threatened to keep hitting me unless I agreed to eat a dead cockroach she had found on the ground,” McKinsey alleged. “Candice then sterilized the cockroach and made me eat the whole thing.”
Throughout the pregnancy, McKinsey wrote, he felt trapped by his circumstances. “I was terrified of Candice hurting me or the baby, but had nowhere to go and limited options, as a pregnant transgender man,” he said in the filing.
The alleged abuse McKinsey documented in court came to light after his death, with the December 2025 filing reviewed following the September shooting. Zhang and Chen, Jang’s parents, allegedly took turns shooting McKinsey in the Dublin Sports Ground parking lot.
The case against Zhang and Chen continues to move through the California court system.