When you live in the nation’s capital long enough, murder loses its shock value. Although fewer people are killed annually than when I moved to the D.C. area in 1991, murder remains in the news often enough that, sadly, you just come to expect it in a city once known as the “murder capital” of the country.

But sometimes the shock hits home. It did for me late last night when I heard, via Facebook, that a classmate of mine from high school had been found dead in the woods behind a convenience store. The initial newsflash sounded suspicious, and sure enough, the police in New Martinsville, W.Va., are now treating the discovery of Mike Ryan’s body as a homicide.

I’m still trying to process the news. Mike was a bit of a wild child in high school and the report I heard from the 20th reunion party I missed (on purpose) led me to believe that he hadn’t changed much. He apparently also had a police record related to his drinking.

But we grew up in Paden City, a peaceful town of about 3,500 people a few miles south of New Martinsville. Murder is a rarity not just there but throughout the area and the state. It’s big news when someone is killed. When I worked at the newspaper in Morgantown, W.Va., during and just after college, the editors marveled that Marion County seemed to have a murder a month.

The eeriness that has overtaken me the last 24 hours is much like the rush of emotions I felt in June 1995 upon arriving at work to hear the news that a colleague had been shot and killed. The details of what happened to Mike are not yet known, but David Kaplan was a victim of unfortunate timing:

After a typical late night at work, Kaplan had returned to the Arlington, Virginia, home in which he was renting an apartment. According to police, when Kaplan arrived a 20-year-old relative of one of the residents had just murdered two residents of the building. The disturbed young man, an apparent stranger to Kaplan, then turned the gun on him.

I had been working closely with Dave on a freelance basis to help edit content for the new legislative database he was spearheading at Congressional Quarterly. Soon after Dave’s death, his boss and mine asked me to head Dave’s team, a promotion I accepted hesitantly because it just felt weird.

I don’t have the same close connection to Mike Ryan that I had to Dave. In fact, I can’t recall having seen him since we graduated in 1985. But it just feels weird to know not only that Mike is gone at the young age of 41 but that he appears to be a victim of murder.

Memories of Mike and of the pleasantly sheltered life we once lived in Paden City have been flooding my mind today. I miss the days when murder was just the stuff of Hollywood movies that my parents wouldn’t let me watch.