A murder and a photo set off a firestorm of controversy in Seaside.

Just past midnight on July 23, multiple residents in the Seaside neighborhood near San Pablo Avenue and Havana Street dialed 911 and reported hearing multiple gunshots. Weekly photographer Nic Coury, who lives in the area, heard the gunfire too and did what’s become second nature for him: He grabbed a camera and set out to find and document what happened. He arrived just minutes after the police, and just seconds before the paramedics.

What had happened was unspeakable tragedy. Seaside resident Ralph Wynn, 28, had been shot to death while driving home from a post-work fast food stop. Wynn’s been described to us and other media as the ultimate good guy – lively and fun and kind, always looking to help others, especially kids. He played for the semi-pro Salinas Valley Spartans football team, coached youth sports and worked at an auto dealership in Seaside. Police don’t yet know, or at least aren’t saying, much about what happened. It seems, though, that Wynn’s death at the hands of still-unidentified gunmen is the ultimate case of an innocent victim being murdered.

Coury trained his lens on the scene as paramedics removed Wynn from the Ford Explorer he was driving. They worked on Wynn for a few minutes, but he died there, in the middle of General Jim Moore Boulevard.

At 10am, Coury posted a brief story along with one of the pictures he took, a shot of Wynn’s body laying next to the Explorer in the background, with three Seaside police officers in the foreground. At about 10:20am, I looked at the picture and asked Coury to switch it out. It was my assessment – and mine alone – that there was a less graphic picture we could use.

In the 20 or so minutes the first image was up, it was apparently copied and forwarded to multiple people, including Wynn’s friends and then his family. By noon, our phone lines had blown up. Our Facebook page, where posts to our website are automatically pushed, also blew up. And in the 15 or so minutes I took to run out and grab a sandwich to eat at my desk, several people came into the newsroom to complain about the picture that had already been taken down. Most everyone was civil, although a few weren’t. And many were also clearly enraged: “How could you?” was the general question.

“This isn’t Oakland and this isn’t Salinas,” one caller, a man who said he previously worked in television news production, told Coury. “This is a small community where we all know each other.” (I guarantee when someone is shot to death in Oakland or Salinas there is a small community who knows that person.)

“There you go, smearing another black man,” another caller said. (The victim’s race wasn’t clear from the picture, and the story didn’t note it.)

“It’s downright shameful and downright distasteful,” another caller said, while another said the picture was “extremely offensive and shocking.”

“I don’t care to hear any rhetoric about the responsibility of the media to provide the truths of this world,” one emailer said, in response to my offer to hear him out. “I hope you sleep well tonight knowing the additional strain and stress you have put on members of this community.”

As much outrage as the picture may have sparked in the community, my decision to take it down and replace it with something else sparked debate within the walls of the Weekly. Why did I decide to take down a compelling, poignant photo?

My answer: Because there were other compelling and poignant photos taken that didn’t show Wynn’s body in such stark relief so soon after his murder.

David Carr, in his July 27 “Media Equation” column in The New York Times, writes “the ubiquity of social media [has] made the world a smaller, seemingly gorier place.

“Bearing witness is the oldest and perhaps most valuable tool in the journalist’s arsenal, but it becomes something different delivered in the crucible of real time, without pause for reflection,” he writes.

Coury’s photo was neither shameful nor offensive. The murder of a young man in the prime of his life who was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time is both those things, and so much more.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com .