For David Copley, the last of four family members to preside over the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper before the publication was sold to a private equity company in 2009, there was no real warning.

Per a report in U-T San Diego, he skipped a reception at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego after chairing a board meeting there last night, saying that he wasn’t feeling well. He later crashed his Aston Martin into a parked car and it is suspected that he suffered a heart attack while at the wheel. Copley’s close friend Dr. Robert Singer announced the 60-year-old former newspaper man’s death in front of Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla at 9:10 p.m.

One of the first people to voice working memories of Copley is Karin Winner, a retired Union-Tribune editor who worked closely with him. Here’s what she told U-T- San Diego:

“David had an enormous capacity for humor and an uncanny ability to understand the bigger picture without having all the facts, which was a trait his mother had.”

Winner is also quoted this morning in the North County Times:

“David was an amazing boss because he really believed in what we were doing as journalists. Because he wasn’t a journalist, he recognized that his role was to just help us do our job and do it well. He had a real reverence for the Fourth Estate and the role that we played as journalists and he always supported that.”

RIP.

[Photo courtesy UCLA's The David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design]