The 23-year-olds Ming Qu and Ying Wu were both electrical engineering students at USC which has the largest number of international students of any U.S. university. Roughly 19% of its 38,000 students are from overseas, including 2,500 from China.

The suit alleges, “USC is not one of the safest U. universities and colleges and does not provide 24-hour law enforcement services in the surrounding neighbourhoods and is in a high crime area.”

“While we have deep sympathy for the victims’ families, this lawsuit is baseless”

The suit accuses USC of misusing the word “urban” to describe the campus’s location knowing that it would be interpreted by Chinese students as a sign of safety because historically in China, urban areas are safer.

In a statement Thursday, USC lawyer Debra Wong Yang said the university is deeply saddened by the tragic deaths but will move to have the lawsuit thrown out.

“While we have deep sympathy for the victims’ families, this lawsuit is baseless,” Yang said.

Yang said that USC offered the victims’ families financial assistance as a “gesture of kindness and sympathy” but that the parents were instructed by their attorney to decline it.

The university claims its security net can stretch only so far and that the killings occurred three-quarters of a mile from campus in the third tier of security, where officers respond to incidents but do not patrol.

Yang said she believes that the courts will find in the university’s favour.

According to The LA Times‘s analysis of crime data in the Adams-Normandie neighbourhood where the shooting occurred, it ranks 27th out of 209 L.A. neighbourhoods for violent crime, putting it in the top fifth of most violent areas.