Both were abusing drugs. Makepa often raised his fists to Burrows, and he nearly abandoned the family after their infant son died. She was coping with the loss of one infant and tending to another sick child by herself. Plus, he had warrants out for his arrest after taking Big Island police on several high-speed chases.

Yet today, the Hilo couple are married — a new beginning — and were chosen to be the 'Ohana of the Year. It's a remarkable happy ending of at least one portion of life for a family that has faced many trials.

Debbie Burrows' voice breaks when she thinks of how far her high school sweetheart had to come to be the man he is now. He wasn't always a loving father — especially during that rough period when their relationship was at its bleakest.

"He was just terrible," Debbie Burrows recalled. "Cold-hearted, ignorant. He did a lot of destruction to me. … During the time I needed him, he was never there."

One night, she decided she'd had enough. As he was passed out after a nasty fight, she called the authorities and held her girls as their dad was carted away. He'd spend the next 13 months in jail.

But something happened on the way to parole. About nine months into the sentence, the man who looked headed down a path to oblivion began to care.

Makepa would open up the snapshots she would send of their youngest children, cataloging all the tiny landmarks in the lives of kids whose childhood he was missing because he was incarcerated. He posted them in his cell, and the coldness around his heart began to thaw.

And the words he was reading in his Bible suddenly seemed to make sense.

The change was upon him. He remembers it vividly: For two days, he couldn't eat, and could barely function.

"I just stood there, crying," said the man now known as Wolfred Burrows, who not only got himself clean but married his children's mother, and even took her name, in a gesture of loyalty and reflection of his changed spirit.

"I said, I'm going to be a new man, the father to my kids and the husband to my wife I really wanted to be."

Sure, plenty of inmates vow to change. But Wolfred Burrows took the steps that would fuse that change for good. He started attending Alternatives to Violence classes and getting clean.

Ray Torres, who was Wolfred Burrows' case manager, remembers Wolfred as a guy who had hit rock bottom.

"When I got Wolfred, he was tired of a lifestyle that was a road to nowhere," said Torres, who recommended the Burrows family for recognition at the Child & Family Service 'Ohana of the Year luncheon, which takes place this year on Oct. 23.

Taking his wife's last name — at Debbie Burrows' request — was unusual, "especially in a world of male privilege," said Torres.

"He went from this great, unusual Hawaiian name to basically a Caucasian name. That said something about his character."

There were seven intense months of treatment — "I saw the glow," Torres recalled — as Wolfred Burrows put himself on a righteous path.

"When I went to Ray's classes, things he told me really made sense," Burrows said. "I started looking at things how my wife saw it."

Now, when Wolfred Burrows looks back at that guy he was before, he barely recognizes him: "That man was more or less a child," he said.

These days, it's different.

"I have more respect, more love for my family," said Wolfred Burrows.

Since then, maybe life didn't get easy, but good things began to happen. Now clean three years, the family still struggles to pay bills and spend time together — one of Wolfred Burrows' jobs is to log trees for a Big Island company, taking him up Mauna Kea on weekdays. But he's also starting up a band and pulling some carpenter work. And on weekends at home, it's a delight to play with the kids.

"It really makes me happy inside," Wolfred Burrows said. "I can finally do things with my kids, my wife. The kids love it. … Life is great, and we can't get any better. I wish I'd opened my heart to my wife 10 years ago."

And he looks at life from a different perch:

"What I believe is us, as men, we have to have knowledge, not to put us first — we must put our wife first, they're the ones that hurt, that take all the pain," he said. "I believe now, (I must) put my wife first, the kids before self, and everything is better. Sure, we struggle, but we're not the first family to struggle."

His relatives in Honolulu "can't believe that's me now," he said. "Here I am, working, holding a job, even having our own home."

His mother died a few months ago. Wolfred Burrows sang a song for the funeral, and astounded those who knew him way back when.

"They said, 'He came clean. Wow. It IS him,' " Wolfred Burrows recalled.

"He did change," said Debbie Burrows, who added that she changed, too: "I had to."

Reading the Bible, finding ways to cope with depression and classes offered by Child & Family Service helped her.

"You have to forgive to look forward in life," said Debbie Burrows. "If not, you're not going to be happy. You cannot hold grudges. (The classes) gave me self-esteem. The more I listened, the more I believed. With their support, I became powerful enough to overcome."