You can’t blame the families of victims for taking this fight all the way to Virginia’s highest court. Read the full report below.

Allie Grasgreen of Inside Higher Ed reports.

Virginia Tech Ruling Reversed

In a decision overturning last year’s jury verdict in a wrongful death lawsuit against the state, the Virginia Supreme Court said Thursday that “there was no duty for the Commonwealth to warn students about the potential for criminal acts” by Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech in 2007.

The lawsuit was filed by the families of two students killed in the shooting. A Montgomery County Circuit Court jury ruled last year that the university was negligent in waiting to inform the campus about the gunman, and that the families of Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson should receive $4 million each (at the state’s request, the amount was later reduced to $100,000). Administrators waited more than two hours after the first two students were shot in a dorm before sending a campuswide alert, which did not indicate a gunman might still be at large.

“[The families] alleged that a special relationship existed between the Commonwealth’s employees at Virginia Tech and Peterson and Pryde that gave rise to the Commonwealth’s duty to warn Peterson and Pryde of third party criminal acts and that the Commonwealth’s failure to warn them was the proximate cause of their deaths,” the decision says. “The Commonwealth argued that there was no foreseeable harm to the students and that the evidence failed to establish that any alleged breach of a duty of care was the proximate cause of the deaths.”

The Supreme Court identified two major reasons to overturn the initial ruling: a misunderstanding of Virginia law by jurors, and the lack of information available to campus police officers at the time of the shootings.