On Dec. 1, at exactly 4:16 a.m., I received a text that woke me up.

It read "Seattle police: Suspect in slaying of 4 police officers shot and killed."

I hadn't had a second thought about the incident until I got into The Clipper office the morning of production, Wednesday Dec. 2, and logged on to my Facebook. There I found a picture of Maurice Clemmons, the man who is the lead suspect in the shooting of the four police officers.

This picture was no mug shot, though; this was clearly a camera phone picture of Clemmons, half naked, lying on a stretcher, arms tied behind his back, dead, bullet wound clearly showing. The picture was disturbing, even for me, a person who is not easily offended.

My first thought was to call over one of my editors. I thought this was something that should be talked about. How could someone post this on their Facebook?

Our first question was where did this come from. The caption below the picture read "Should police be allowed to take pictures like this!?" but there was no real way of finding out if this is true. The caption also read that the picture had been sent to this person through a picture message on their phone.

Our next question was, what were we going to do with this? We all made the agreement that we did not want this photo in our paper: it was hard enough for us to look at we couldn't imagine how our readers would respond. It was too gruesome and just unsettling.

This picture was not in news outlets at the time. It only appears, as far as we could find, on this person's Facebook and the phones of people that got this picture message.

Whether this person who posted the picture wants to or not, they could possibly be a part of the investigation, or even a new one on why this picture was taken and sent around.

With the technology we have today, I wonder if people think about the consequences of putting things like this so casually online?

What does this say about the culture we live in today? How is it that a person gets this photo and one of their thoughts is to post it on their Facebook for everyone to see?

What is the point of even posting it online? Is it to create a debate on whether whoever took this picture should have taken it, or if they have a right to take it, or just for the shock value?

Did the person even realize that there would be a shock? Is our culture so used to images like this that we cannot differentiate when something is appropriate to post on our Facebook wall and when it is not?

I understand this is real life and we must all realize that life is not all filled with flowers and puppies but also includes death. These are all questions left unanswered.

This photo accomplishes nothing. No one needs to see this photo to know four police officers were shot and killed.

This man, regardless of if he killed four police officers, is still a human and for many of us it is hard to see another human dead, especially when logging on to something like Facebook that is not meant to be shocking.

At this point who knows how far this picture has gone but I hope that something like this doesn't pop up on my Facebook ever again.