In-laws arrested after New York Times Games engineering director

The man who helped run the New York Times’ Games division got a real-world reminder that not everything is a puzzle with a neat answer. Jonathan McKinsey, 40, was shot dead outside a home Saturday, and police had his in-laws in handcuffs within minutes. The Times’ word games are beloved by millions. That doesn’t make this story any easier to digest.

We don’t know what led to the shooting. Reports say the parents-in-law were arrested at the scene, which suggests something raw and immediate. Maybe it was a custody dispute. Maybe a long-simmering argument. Whatever it was, it ended with a 40-year-old dead and two people accused of killing their own son-in-law. That’s not a headline. That’s a family tragedy in three parts.

There’s an uncomfortable truth here that polite society likes to skip. The family is the most dangerous place in America. Not the street, not the border, not some far-off war. For all the talk about family values, the people closest to us can become the people who hurt us most. This case involves a high-ranking Times employee, but it could just as easily be any household anywhere. A Wordle streak won’t fix a broken home.

Our thoughts are with McKinsey’s friends and colleagues at the Times, who lost a man who made their product run smoothly. And we hope the legal system sorts this out fairly. There is no puzzle piece that explains this one. Something went terribly wrong, and now a family is shattered. No algorithm, no clever puzzle, no well-edited obituary will change that.