LAMAR — The freckle-faced girl with the dark-brown eyes didn’t speak; she tugged her mother through the house so she could point and grunt at what she wanted.

Her older brother didn’t talk either, and called his sister “uh-ah.” Sometimes, he was filled with such rage he would screech and scream and flip over furniture and tear the curtains off the walls.

They were not potty-trained. They stuffed any food they saw into their mouths. They did not sleep for longer than 20 minutes at a time, all night long. At first.

That was five years ago, when the brother and sister rescued from a filthy Denver apartment came to live with the couple who would adopt them. It was one of the worst cases of neglect Denver had seen. And in a case that outraged Colorado, history repeated itself this fall — four young boys were rescued from the same apartment, filled with maggots, flies and feces, and from the same parents.

Now 7 and 9, the children taken away from that apartment in 2006 are polite and friendly and rosy-cheeked from the brisk plains wind that sweeps across farm fields surrounding their family’s mini ranch. They collect eggs from the henhouse, snuggle with barn cats, outdo each other on the swings and help feed alpacas.

The boy and girl go to a charter school out in the country, and after years of therapy, they are nearly at grade level. She loves Barbies and catching kitties and riding her bike along the dirt driveway. Her brother dresses in bolo ties and cowboy boots, and usually has a wrench or two in the back pocket of his jeans, so he can fix stuff.

They are normal kids — it “just took them longer to get normal,” said their dad, Jeff Hillman.

The kids called them mom and dad the first day they met them in 2008. For months, the parents reminded the boy and girl before they went to sleep that they are theirs “for always,” that no one can take them away.

The kids need to hear it, because it happened to them before.

It was 2006 when strangers called Denver police to say little kids, in only diapers, were playing in busy 18th Avenue east of downtown. Their parents weren’t home, and the apartment was so filthy authorities could smell it from outside.

The three children, never taught to speak or use the bathroom, lived in foster homes as child-protection workers fought a years-long court battle that ended in Lorinda Bailey and Wayne Sperling losing parental rights in 2008.

The oldest, a girl, was adopted by the Colorado foster family that had taken care of her for two years. The Hillmans adopted the younger two, who were 2 and 4 and had spent two years in foster homes — the second one so neglectful that the children were regressing and had to leave “urgently,” the Hillmans recalled.

The children had been raised almost like animals, without adults to take care of them or even put them to bed at night. The oldest sister, who wasn’t quite 5 when authorities took them from their parents, was their protector.

In 2003, the Hillmans’ biological son was born two months early, weighing only 3 pounds. The pregnancy was so rough, they knew they wouldn’t try it again. They wanted to adopt.

When they learned the story of the children rescued from 18th Avenue, the Hillmans were rattled to their core. Their decision was made the first second they saw the boy and girl step out of a caseworker’s car that pulled up to their home in the south Denver suburbs.

“I couldn’t even hardly say it. I said, ‘Those are our kids,’ ” Meagan recalled, tears in her eyes. Within a week, the children moved in with their new family.

The first six months were the most challenging.

The Hillmans got little to no sleep because the children were terrified of nighttime. They weren’t used to a bedtime routine; a police report from a visit to the Denver apartment mentions little kids, all in diapers, wandering around at midnight.

The Hillmans’ new son was, at 4 years old, like a newborn, only stronger and more destructive. “He was just terrified, I think,” Meagan said. “He would jump around the room and throw furniture.”

“I was thinking, ‘Why did we do this and do I need to fear for our safety?’ ” she said. “We were tried. All I can say is we had started with a good foundation and a good marriage, and we are pretty patient people.”

Taking them anywhere was a challenge those first few months because the children had no boundaries, no awareness about what could hurt them. Given the chance, they would get lost or walk out in traffic. And people would stare because they talked in gibberish and grunts.

If there were bowls of nuts or candy set out at a friend’s house, the kids devoured them all. The Hillmans avoided buffets and leaving food visible at home for years, until the children learned to stop eating when they were full.

In foster care, their son had communicated by pointing at picture cards showing a plate of food, a bathroom or the outside. He hated the cards, the Hillmans said, so they didn’t use them. Instead, he wanted the long, and often frustrating, face-to-face conversations in which his parents would say repeatedly, “Try again. We don’t understand.” He wore pull-ups until he was nearly 7.

Things got harder before they got easier.

“They were testing us to see if we would keep them,” Meagan said.

The children were “good soldiers” when they were at preschool or when the family had visitors. When the Hillmans told relatives and friends what went on at night, they didn’t fully believe them. They accused them of having too many rules.

Then the Hillmans left the children with friends for two hours so they could attend Meagan’s holiday work party, but only the dinner because they were too nervous to stay longer. Their son had one of his violent blowups, and then their friends understood what the family was going through. “It was almost a relief,” Meagan said.

The Hillmans’ oldest son, who was 5 when his new brother and sister moved in, handled it all with patience that amazed his parents. Each night, they checked in with him. Only once did he say he wished his brother and sister would go away. “And then right away he said, ‘But they could come back,’ ” Meagan remembered.

Soon after the adoption was final, in 2009, the Hillmans moved to a farmhouse outside of Lamar, a few acres filled with animals and an old silo along a dirt road.

“This is the best medicine for these kids,” said their grandpa, Michael Ellsberry. “There is nothing around here to hurt them.”

The country was a kind of therapy for the kids. But there was also therapeutic preschool, mental-health therapy to work on the boy’s anger, physical therapy for coordination, occupational therapy to catch up on fine-motor skills that weren’t developed during the toddler stage, and speech therapy to make up for years of delays.

The Hillmans had the children genetically tested to see whether there was any biological reason for their lack of speech. None was found.

Now, their son speaks clearly, and their daughter, despite recently giving her two front teeth to the tooth fairy, is fairly easy to understand. The Hillmans believe the girl was slow to speak even though she was rescued as an infant because she spent years mimicking her brother.

The kids have surpassed every expectation the Hillmans set. Still, the effects of their first few years, especially for their adopted son, could last a lifetime.

At 9, he still throws kicking-and- screaming fits typical of a younger child. His mother is no longer concerned about the family’s safety, but she worries his blowups will continue into adulthood, affecting his work and relationships.

The boy is constantly on a high state of alert. He investigates every new place, every new person. The sound of a car driving by at 2 a.m. can wake him. “I heard a noise,” he will say, and then stay up until morning.

The adoptive mother of the kids’ oldest sister called the Hillmans when it all happened again. Four more children — ages 2, 4, 5 and 6, all boys — were taken from the same apartment by Denver Human Services authorities. They couldn’t talk. They weren’t potty-trained.

“It was horrible. I didn’t know it would affect me like it did, really,” Meagan said. “It just kind of stops you in your tracks. How in the heck does that happen?”

Meagan had often wondered about those parents, whether they had more kids, whether caseworkers were checking on them. No one had for years, it seems. Neighbors reported that they had called police and child welfare, concerned about the boys they saw hanging out the window. Human services officials won’t comment about their involvement with the family, citing confidentiality laws.

The Hillmans opened up about their children because they are angry at child-welfare authorities for allowing four more kids to live the same way. “The focus should be kids, not the policies, not the organization, not the job — the kids are the job,” Jeff said.

More than that, they want people to know it’s worth taking a chance on the four boys, who were removed from the apartment Sept. 30.

“Whoever takes these boys on is going to have a very long road, but it’s so worth it,” Meagan said. “They are my kids’ brothers. It would be nice if my kids would know them someday.”

The Hillmans’ children see their older sister, now a sixth-grader, once a year. The families are among the few who know how hard it is to get a neglected child to trust. “They have to learn to rely on you and learn to let you love them,” Meagan said.

And when they do, she said, “they give way more than they take.”

Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jenbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost