He served as the primary caretaker of his disabled brother and once rescued him and their little sister from a condemned house with no electricity or food after their mother moved out and left the children.
"There is so much more to David Miller than the summer of 2007," Bailey told the judge.
Of the shootings - which Miller maintains he did not commit - the defense attorney said, "In a few minutes, his life, his strength, all unraveled."
But Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger, who prosecuted the case, told the judge that the Miller family's history would have mattered only if the defendant were being sentenced for shoplifting or stealing money.
"His selfishness - and the brutality that followed - is the only thing that matters here today," he said.
Elizabeth Walters was 6 years old when she was assigned to the foster home of Don and Vivian Walters - the first of about 40 children the Hamilton couple would take in over the years.
Don Walters, who had never so much as baby-sat a child before, and his wife, a day care provider who routinely worked with children, cared for the girl for only a month before the courts returned her to her birth family.
But it was one life-changing month.
"She so impacted us that we changed our foster care license from one child to two so we would be able to continue fostering other children but would always have a space for her if she came back into the system," Vivian Walters told the judge. Returning six months later, Elizabeth "became our daughter that night even though it took the foster care system four years to make it legal."
Between her birth and adoptive families, Elizabeth Walters had 11 siblings. Growing up that way gave Walters strong feelings about wanting her own daughter to know her family - "all of her family," Vivian Walters told the judge.
She also told him that she hoped Miller could be forced to think of her daughter and the granddaughter that she never knew every day for the rest of his life and that he would never have the opportunity to father another child.
Levitz sentenced Miller to two concurrent prison terms of life without parole. He added a concurrent 20-year sentence for the attempted murder of Lowe.
After the hearing, Vivian and Don Walters expressed particular gratitude for their daughter's friend. "We're thankful for Heather, that she had the courage to go through all this," Vivian Walters said.
Her husband added, "We're glad we didn't lose her, too. She's our extended family now."
