The Virginia Supreme Court has appointed a Franklin County judge to handle the two civil suits filed by victims' families unhappy with the response to the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shootings.

Circuit Court Judge William Alexander was named a special judge to oversee the suits transferred in June to Montgomery County. The order dated Aug. 4 is on file in the Montgomery County Circuit Court clerk's office.

The county's five circuit court judges recused themselves from the suits and petitioned the state's highest court to appoint the special judge.

"A lot of individuals are named as defendants. ... We know a lot of these people. We have personal and professional relationships with these people. ... All of us have one or more conflicts," Chief Circuit Court Judge Colin Gibb said in an earlier interview.

Celeste and Grafton Peterson and Harry and Karen Pryde filed their suits in April on the second anniversary of the shootings.

The suits each ask for $10 million in damages for the deaths of their daughters, Nicole Peterson and Julia Pryde. They allege negligence in the handling of Seung-Hui Cho's ongoing mental health and behavioral problems in the two years before the shootings and claim in part that three Cook Counseling Center employees who had contact with Cho either didn't make records of that contact, as required by law, or later lost or destroyed those records.

Records of those contacts came to light July 16, when former Cook Counseling Center Director Robert Miller turned in several pages of Cho's mental health records found in his Blacksburg home. Miller, who was removed as counseling center director two months after Cho was seen there, is named as a defendant in both suits. A statement issued by his attorney stated that Miller discovered the records while searching for documents in response to the suits.

Kaine has said he will ask Cho's estate to release the recovered documents for public review. Despite a formal request signed by dozens of shooting survivors and families of the dead, the governor has said he likely will not reconvene an eight-member review panel that investigated the shootings in 2007.

Last month Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds released a statement saying if information contained in Cho's records has "the potential to alter the conclusions in the panel's final report, I will support efforts to formally reconvene the panel to update the report."