"No plausible scenario was made for how this horror could have been prevented once he began that morning," Steger said.
He said he will neither resign nor ask Virginia Tech's police chief to quit, despite demands by some of the victims' families that he and others be held accountable.
"In my view of the world, the buck stops at the top," said Williams O'Neil, whose son Daniel was among the students slain. "I think that in this case, his lack of leadership and his lack of compassion for the families is just astounding."
It took administrators more than two hours to get out the first e-mail warning after Cho killed two people in a dormitory. In the interim, Cho mailed off a video confession to NBC and then made his way across campus to a classroom building, where he killed 30 more victims and committed suicide.
During those two hours, Steger said, administrators carefully considered how to deal with the first burst of gunfire, including a warning or a complete campus lockdown.
In the end, according to the report, administrators concluded that the shooting was a boyfriend-girlfriend dispute and that the gunman had probably left the campus. Also, the report said, they were afraid of causing panic, as happened at the start of the school year, when the first day of classes was called off because an escaped murder suspect was at large near campus.
Asked directly whether he would have done anything differently that day in April, Steger said no.
"I am not aware of anything the police learned that would have indicated that a mass murder was imminent," he said. "The panel researched reports of multiple shootings on campuses for the past 40 years, and no scenario was found in which the first murder was followed by a second elsewhere on campus. Nowhere."
The panel, appointed by Governor Timothy M. Kaine, released its report late Wednesday, and Kaine said he was standing by Steger and other top administrators and not pressing for their firing because they have suffered enough.
Instead, he said he would focus on preventive measures, such as better communication between the parents of troubled children and the colleges they attend.
"The information needs to flow both ways," the governor said.
