Oct 31, 2013 02:49 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

More than six years after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, a court ruling related to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre has been reversed, the Washington Post reported.

The families of two students slain by lone gunman Seung Hui-Cho filed and won a wrongful death lawsuit against the state of Virginia was negligent in their children's death. Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson were two of 32 killed that day by Cho, before he killed himself.

The families were awarded $4 million dollars each in the decision last year, but that total was lowered to $100,000 per family. Pryde and Peterson were killed in Norris Hall on the school's Blacksburg campus.

Announced Thursday, the Virginia State Supreme Court justices wrote in their decision that "there was no duty for the Commonwealth to warn students about the potential for [Cho's] criminal acts."

Julia's father, Harry Pryde, said the family was "deeply saddened that the court was so dismissive of assigning responsibility and was so protective of the commonwealth."

"We still take a good measure of satisfaction that the jury listened to all of the evidence and decided as it did," he said, adding that the lawsuit was about accountability and not money. "We don't feel at all that the Supreme Court can take that away from us."

Brian Gottstein, director of communication for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, said the decision confirmed that Virginia had no way of knowing the lone gunman would go on to commit such a heinous act.

"While words cannot express the tremendous sympathy we have for the families who lost their loved ones in the Virginia Tech shootings of 2007 - including the Prydes and the Petersons - the Virginia Supreme Court has found what we have said all along to be true: The commonwealth and its officials at Virginia Tech were not negligent on April 16, 2007," Gottstein said in a statement. "Cho was the lone person responsible for this tragedy."

According to the Associated Press, the Peterson and Pryde families argued in the original lawsuit that the state had hours to alert the Virginia Tech community of an active shooter. Cho killed two students in a dormitory before opening fire elsewhere on the campus hours later.

The state argued that law enforcement categorized the initial shooting as a domestic dispute and saw no need to alert the entire campus.

Wrote the justices in their decision: "it cannot be said that it was known or reasonably foreseeable that students in Norris Hall would fall victim to criminal harm."

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