CHRISTIANSBURG -- A special judge is expected to decide next month if two $10 million wrongful death lawsuits filed by families of women killed on April 16, 2007, will go forward against Virginia Tech officials and the New River Valley Community Services board.

After nearly five hours of legal arguments among five attorneys, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge William Alexander said Monday he will rule in writing by Jan. 15 on whether the officials, as agents of the state, are immune to civil action.

Alexander said that before the hearing he thought he would rule from the bench Monday, but changed his mind during oral arguments. After hearing from the attorneys, the judge said he found himself "going back and forth and changing my mind."

Alexander was named special justice in the case when the judges of the 27th Circuit, including Montgomery County, recused themselves, citing personal ties to the long list of defendants. The case is being heard in Christiansburg.

If Alexander permits the case to go forward, families of the victims of the worst school shooting in U.S. history may get the chance to depose senior Tech officials and demand a full accounting of how critical decisions were made and who made them on the day 33 faculty and students were killed and 26 injured.

A handful of victims' relatives sat in the courtroom Monday, including Andy Goddard, father of wounded student Colin Goddard. After the hearings he expressed hope that the judge would allow the case to continue.

Goddard said meetings between officials and the families promised in a legal settlement did not provide enough information and that a special panel report was similarly vague on some important issues.

"This is the last chance," Goddard said. "I'd like to see a forum whereby it's stated who did what when."

The families of Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson filed suits on the second anniversary of the shootings and named four groups of defendants: Virginia Tech and administrators, including President Charles Steger; Tech's Cook Counseling Center and several staff members; the New River Valley Community Services board and administrators; and the estate of shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

They were the only families of the dead to decline to join a settlement agreement with the state and university that offered money, counseling and private meetings with officials, among other guarantees.

Among a long list of allegations, the suits claim that university officials convened to respond to the shootings were more concerned with salvaging the university's image preceding a fundraising campaign than with notifying the campus that a killer might be loose.

The suits also allege that employees of the Cook Counseling Center should have known about the shooter's history of bizarre and frightening behavior documented by some of his professors, but failed to provide effective treatment to him when he contacted the center in 2005.

The New River Valley Community Services board and employees are accused of failing to monitor the shooter after a special justice found him mentally ill and a danger to himself or others and ordered that he receive outpatient treatment.

Because of these and other alleged failures, the suits claim the defendants were negligent -- and in some cases, grossly negligent -- and liable for the deaths of their daughters.

All the defense attorneys argued that their clients, as employees or agents of the state, are immune to civil action. They further argued that under the law, officials had no duty to warn Pryde or Peterson of any criminal act Cho might commit.

Mike Melis of the attorney general's office argued that Tech officials worked hard to make the correct decisions about notification, but faced dilemmas such as what to tell students to do. He said they faced questions such as whether students should stay in their dorms when two students had just been shot in one, or if students should leave campus and gather at a certain location.

Melis argued that the fact that officials held discussions and issued an e-mail notification protects them from allegations of gross negligence.

No arguments related to the Cho estate were presented Monday.

Five defendants were dropped from the lawsuits at the request of plaintiffs attorney Robert Hall. They were Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum, Dean of Students Tom Brown, General Counsel Kay Heidbreder, Cook Counseling Center Director Chris Flynn and Cook employee Sandra Ward.

Flinchum, Brown and Heidbreder were likely not members of the "emergency policy group" that made decisions on university response to the shootings, Hall said. But he said he could add them back to the defendants list if information linking them to those decisions comes to light in the next six months.

Ward was suspected of mishandling records of Cho's interactions with center counselors, but Hall dropped her Monday because former center Director Robert Miller admitted to mistakenly taking the records from his office when he was demoted in 2006.

Flynn was dropped because he was named director after Cho's 2005 interactions with the center, Hall said.