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The parents of two students killed in the Virginia Tech shootings said Friday they filed lawsuits against the state, the school and many officials individually in hopes of finally revealing the whole truth about April 16, 2007.

The families of Julia Kathleen Pryde and Erin Nicole Peterson filed suits in Fairfax County Circuit Court on Thursday, the second anniversary of the shootings and the deadline for litigation.

In their suits, they claim in part that university officials were more concerned about the university's image than about students' safety, and that three Cook Counseling Center employees who had contact with shooter Seung-Hui Cho on separate occasions either didn't make records of that contact, as required by law, or later lost, misplaced or destroyed those records.

Because of those officials' failures, the suit alleges, opportunities to prevent the shootings in which Cho killed 32 students and faculty members were lost.

In a written statement released Friday, Celeste and Grafton Peterson and Harry and Karen Pryde said university officials' "misstatements of facts" since the day of the shootings persuaded them "that the complete truth remains to be revealed. What may be efforts to manage the truth through distortion have led us to the unfortunate conclusion that we must file suit."

Of the 48 families that filed notices of claim with the state, leaving the option of litigation open, only the families of Pryde and Peterson did not agree to a state settlement that barred them from later filing suit.

In their statement, the two sets of parents said they respect the decisions of the families who accepted the settlement, but that they decided "that agreeing to settle before we knew the full truth was not appropriate for us."

Their request that the university open its archives of documents related to April 16 for their review was denied, they said. But the archives were made public this year as part of the settlement to the other families, giving them an opportunity to review the documents that would become a large part of their case.

"Some of the information in the archives contradicted the official accounts, and the archives did not contain other important documents they had expected to find there," their lawyer, Robert Hall, said in an e-mail Friday.

Hall, a lawyer with the Reston firm Hall, Sickels, Frei & Mims, said the Petersons and the Prydes came to him independently.

"Their goal is accountability," he said. "It's about finding out the truth and, if someone who should have been held accountable has not yet accepted responsibility for what happened, they plan to ask them to do so now.

"The only vehicle afforded them was a lawsuit for money damages."

The families are seeking a total of $10 million from the state, Virginia Tech, university officials and the mental health board.

Hall is one of the lawyers who represented Earl Washington, a Virginia man who was only nine days away from his scheduled execution for a 1982 rape and murder conviction when granted clemency. DNA evidence cleared Washington of involvement and he received a full pardon in 2006.

Hall said the suits related to April 16 were filed in Fairfax County because both Erin Peterson and Cho lived there at the time of their deaths.

The Prydes, who live in New Jersey, also elected to file suit where Cho lived and to have both suits pending in the same jurisdiction so one judge could manage the cases.