By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2007 2:20 PM

Some parents of Virginia Tech students who were killed in the April 16 shooting rampage by student gunman Seung-Hui Cho expressed disappointment with recommendations contained in the report released this morning by the eight-member panel appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. Some wanted university officials to lose their jobs.

The governor and the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors should "show some leadership" by firing university President Charles Steger and campus police chief Wendell Flinchum, said Celeste Peterson, mother of freshman Erin Peterson.

"This is his opportunity to step up and do the right thing," she said.

In an interview yesterday, Kaine said that neither Steger nor Flinchum should lose his job because of the findings of the panel. The problems the panel identified "would not be solved" by replacing them, the governor said.

Peter Read, the father of Mary Read, an Annandale High School graduate and Virginia Tech freshman who died in the attack, said that the panel "did just about as good a job as they could do given their mandate. They didn't have all the information, but you'll never have a perfect knowledge of past events."

"Our focus now is to work with the governor's office to get these recommendations implemented," Read said.

He said that he and his wife Cathy couldn't help but be disappointed that the report did not "name by name who is accountable in each instance" but "it's clear from their verbiage that what they call the top leadership of the university . . . is where the accountability lies."

"One area where we as family members have to stand firm is on this accountability issue," he said. "It's hard for us to believe that anybody could not read this report and not believe that key people should be held accountable."

Read stopped short of calling for the ouster of the university's president.

"There is a whole series of failures in leadership," he said. "I have to keep going back to the weeks and months and years prior to those failures. Intervention at the early stages [of Cho's life] would have had a much better chance for preventing any incident from occurring. But in the final days, hours and minutes and actual day of the event itself. . . I would have expected the leaders at a top-notch university who are responsible for the safety and security of thousands of students to have a better grasp of a crisis situation. Obviously they didn't."

William O'Neil, father of slain graduate student Daniel O'Neil, also criticized the panel for not holding university officials accountable. "I think it's outrageous, in what I've read of the report so far, that no one is held accountable, O'Neil told the Associated Press. "With the exception, of course, of Cho, no one from the university is held accountable."

Students on campus this morning were generally supportive of the administration.

University officials "probably" could have responded more quickly, Virginia Beach senior Talesha Thompson told the Associated Press, but "they didn't want chaos on campus."

Student Lauren Dillon of Irmo, S.C., said she thinks "they did the best they could do."

Gene Cole, a custodian at Norris Hall, said Cho shot at him five times, but he was not wounded. He said he thought school officials did all they could.