I had rarely seen a more devastated couple. Maybe, too, it is what you get when you answer the phone late at night and agree to open your heart and home to a pair of orphaned young girls.

Ron and Tracy Stevenson deserved better. Just about everyone in the sad case of Carla and Angel Grayson knew those infant twins would be extremely well served by being adopted by the Aurora couple.

Everyone, that is, except the judge in the case.

It is why, nearly two months after his ruling was handed down, Ron and Tracy Stevenson, standing in the middle of a gorgeous pink-and-white toy-stuffed nursery they set up in the bedroom next to theirs, are blinking back tears.

Maybe they should have just let the phone ring that day. It was Tracy's aunt from Oklahoma on the other end. Summer is dead, the aunt said.

All Tracy knew of her unmarried 21-year-old first cousin was that she was one of the eight or so children her uncle - her father's brother - had sired between stints in prison. Mostly she knew that Summer had lived a rough life, much of it in and out of foster care.

Oh, but there was more, the aunt told her. She had just given birth to twin girls, both born cocaine-addicted. A few days after leaving the hospital alone, the aunt informed her, Summer died, dead of a drug overdose.

She was old, the aunt told Tracy Stevenson. She could not possibly take the girls. The state, though, was now desperate to find a relative who would.

Were they interested?

Ron and Tracy Stevenson live in a newer, sprawling five-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac on the eastern outskirts of Aurora.

Ron, 50, is an electrical engineer. Tracy, 42, is a housewife. Each of them has grown sons from earlier marriages. Together, they have one son, Zachary, 15. The odd thing is, they had been discussing foster parenting, even adopting. Of course, they would take the girls.

There is not nearly enough space here to retell the entire saga of the Stevensons and the twin girls.

It ended, though, on June 25 in the courtroom of Comanche County District Judge C. William Stratton. Despite recommendations from Department of Human Services investigators in Colorado and Oklahoma, and the attorney selected to represent the twins, he granted custody of the girls to the foster couple who had taken them in from the hospital.

"The Stevensons would make great parents for the twins," Erin Hunt, an Arapahoe County Department of Human Services investigator, told the court in a thick, glowing report submitted last October.

Yet at the conclusion of a nearly eight-hour hearing, Judge Stratton concluded, according to the transcript of his remarks, "I think (the Stevensons) are very nice people. I think they've done the best they can.

"Yet these foster parents have bonded with these children. These are the people that they know as Mom and Dad."

That was it. He awarded custody based on the amount of time the twins had spent with both couples.

Ron and Tracy Stevenson nearly fell to the floor. Had he really said that?

If the judge had done what they and their attorney had asked 11 months prior, to allow them to immediately foster-parent the girls, that bond would have been with family, with them.

The girls are now the fourth and fifth kids living in the foster parents' home.

Maybe it didn't happen for all the reasons they thought that it would, the Stevensons told me. They are an interracial couple. The twins, too, are biracial.

Challenged on this - that race could have played a part - they say maybe it was because they were perceived in Lawton, Okla., as Denver city slickers.

"I knew from going there every month that everybody in that town knew everyone else, the judge included," Tracy Stevenson said. "We were the outsiders."

Standing in the nursery, the couple spoke of how they were both emotionally and financially flayed, still paying off the more than $10,000 it cost them in attorney, travel and other fees to do what they called the right thing.

Tracy produces a stack of photographs, ordered by date, in which the girls are growing older in each one and she and Ron are cradling and playing with the two girls.

"Would we do it again? Of course, we would. We don't regret a second of it," Ron Stevenson said, "no matter the stress and the tears it has caused. We are just puzzled.

"The worst thing is, those little girls are family. And family just doesn't belong in a foster home."

Tracy Stevenson has in recent days written to the governor of Oklahoma, her last appeal, she figures.

Just walking into the nursery, the framed pictures of the twins still sitting on the tall table separating the two cribs, is still painful, but they have no plans to dismantle it.

"We've got three sons, is how I look at it now," Ron Stevenson says before looking away. "We'll keep it. You know, for grandkids."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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