J. Daniel Dolan spent many years teaching at the same wing of the same building where 30 people were killed Monday morning.

He came to WSU in 2002 as a professor of civil and environmental engineering, after more than a dozen years at Virginia Tech. Even after crossing the country about five years ago, he still feels a connection to the Virginia institution.

He first heard the news reports of shootings in his former building at about 9:30 a.m., and was still hoping to get in touch with friends and past colleagues at about 2:15 p.m. For hours after the shooting occurred, he wondered how tragedies like this could happen.

“It makes me wonder about society,” Dolan said.

Dolan said he works with many other WSU professors who have ties to the Blacksburg, Va., campus.

Similar campuses a nation apart William Cofer, an associate professor of civil engineering, said there are striking similarities between Virginia Tech and WSU and that many professors and students have ties to the East Coast school.

“They call Pullman the ‘Blacksburg of the West,’ ” Cofer said.

Eight professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have ties with Virginia Tech, according to an online staff listing. Although he didn’t know specific numbers, Cofer said a lot of WSU students go to Blacksburg for graduate school.

Cofer got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there.

In the late 1970s, he spent his days at Norris Hall, where the second shooting occurred Monday.

“I’m in absolute shock,” he said. “It was like someone kicked me in the stomach.” Virginia Tech, like WSU, is a land-grant institution in an agricultural area. Like Pullman, Blacksburg is a small college town dominated by a state school. These similarities draw Virginia Tech students and faculty to WSU, Cofer said.

“Tech is to Virginia what WSU is to Washington,” Cofer said. “They’re just like us.” Donald Bender, the Weyerhouser professor in the WSU Civil and Environmental Engineering department, also got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tech. He said he was there a couple weeks ago, and teaches a short course on the campus every year.

“Several of us work with colleagues there and publish articles together,” he said. “I published with a colleague there.” Bender left the Blacksburg campus in 1980, but the shooting hit him hard and left him confused.

“I’m in a fog,” he said.