Virginia Tech promised yesterday to make public some, if not all, records of the April 16, 2007, massacre that it previously planned to keep private.

Families of those who died in the shootings said they were upset by earlier statements that the university planned to keep documents about the tragedy out of a public archive it promised to set up.

They said a key element of their settlement with the state was a promise that records long kept secret would be opened to public scrutiny -- particularly any about shooter Seung-Hui Cho and about actions of top university officials in the 2½ hours between Cho's first two murders and the massacre at Norris Hall, where Cho killed 30 people and then himself.

"It is my understanding that much of the above will be in the settlement archive," Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said in an e-mail yesterday, referring to those records.

That includes at least some documents of top Tech officials' emergency Policy Group meeting on the morning of April 16 -- records that Hincker said last week were not to be in the public archive called for by the settlement.

It also will include Cho's academic records but not his health records.

It will not include 911 calls from that day, Hincker said.

Families of the victims feel they've yet to get the full story about what happened that day, despite a state investigation last year.

"There are just too many open questions. They've not been fully open with us," said Michael Pohle of Flemington, N.J., whose son, Michael, was killed. "It is spin city."

The families said Tech's apparent decision -- now partly reversed -- to withhold some documents particularly was upsetting.

"It feels like that is not what we agreed to in the settlement. That was the whole purpose, to get to the truth," said Linda Gwaltney, stepmother of Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, a Thomas Dale High School graduate and magna cum laude engineering graduate of Tech, who was just weeks away from completing his graduate degree when he was killed.

"There's a selfish reason, because we need to know what happened to our son," she said. "But I think the public needs to know, too."

All but one set of notes from the Policy Group and a box of records about Cho were withheld from the university's response to a Richmond Times-Dispatch Freedom of Information Act request for documents submitted to the families' lawyers.

The newspaper's review last week of 20,000 pages of documents the university did release showed there was an unlocked door to Norris Hall on April 16 -- police unsuccessfully tried three doors Cho chained shut and had to shoot out a lock to get inside the building while the killings were going on.

The documents also suggest a connection Cho may have had with the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall, the site of his first two killings. The documents additionally disclosed that counseling center records about Cho were "inadvertently destroyed."

Tech did not release to the families' lawyers one key set of records -- police radio calls on the day, which apparently prompted one administrator to lock down her offices before the Norris Hall shootings.

Douglas Fierberg, attorney for the families, said a key goal of the settlement was to make all the records of those days available in a public archive.

"They, and the general public, are entitled to understand fully the cause and circumstances surrounding this tragedy, if only so other lives can be spared by reducing the possibility of having the university's and President [Charles W.] Steger's mistakes repeated," Fierberg said.

"The university should have nothing to fear from disclosure of the full truth, unless its current stance is based upon a need to hide the truth about the flawed decision-making of its most senior officials," Fierberg said.

The families' questions focus on the actions of the Policy Group and the Virginia Tech Police Department after the first two shootings, in West Ambler Johnston Hall. They also wonder whether university officials were careless about helping Cho before his final, deadly breakdown.

Among their key questions: