Va. Tech Families Cite 'Legacy' of Campus Safety The families of victims and survivors of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech call campus safety measures instituted at colleges and universities nationwide a "living legacy" that won't be diminished by a court decision involving two who were killed. The VTV Family Outreach Foundation said the changes sparked by the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history remain strong despite a Virginia Supreme Court ruling Thursday that tossed a jury's wrongful death finding against the state stemming from two students' deaths during the rampage. Justices concluded that Tech administrators did not have a duty to warn students that a gunman remained at large after he had killed two people in a dormitory and that they had no way to anticipate he would go on to kill 30 more and himself. The court ruled in the case of two students whose families argued that they might have survived the rampage if the administrators alerted the campus earlier to the gunman's initial shootings at a dormitory. Instead, Erin Nicole Peterson, Julia Kathleen Pryde and 28 other people were killed nearly three hours later in Norris Hall, a classroom building. But the justices agreed with the state - that there was no way to anticipate the deadly intentions of student Seung-Hui Cho. "Thus, as a matter of law, the commonwealth did not have a duty to protect students against third party criminal acts," the court wrote. Since the shootings, U.S. campuses have instituted warning systems across different platforms - cellphone alerts, warning sirens - and have been proactive in working to prevent a repeat of what happened in Blacksburg, Va. Advocates and family members of victims said the ruling won't change that. "Improvements to how colleges and universities across the country, post April 16, 2007, handle threat assessment and emergency response spurred by the tragedy have fundamentally improved campus safety," the VTV Family Outreach Foundation said in a statement. This is their living legacy. The foundation and its 32 National Campus Safety Initiative - named for the number of victims at Tech - works to promote efforts to make college campuses safer. "The April 16, 2007, tragedy forever changed campus safety," said S. Daniel Carter, director of the initiative. This court ruling does nothing to diminish that. In Thursday's ruling, the justices reversed the jury's findings and issued a final ruling, meaning there is no avenue for appeal. The state attorney general's office said the court "found what we have said all along to be true." Spokesman Brian Gottstein wrote in an email: "The commonwealth and its officials at Virginia Tech were not negligent on April 16, 2007. Cho was the lone person responsible for this tragedy. The case was the lone pending legal action stemming from the massacre, Gottstein said. The appeal attorney representing the parents of Peterson, 18, and Pryde, 23, said justices applied a stricter standard than the trial judge. The public perception of the university's actions could be a different matter, attorney L. Steven Emmert said. "Now in the court of public opinion, the university may suffer - that's quite possible, but that's not the court's to deal with," he said. Courts will decide legal rights.