A makeshift memorial grew in front of Bella Bond’s Maxwell street home. Jennifer Smith photo
Before she was found, dead and without a name on the Deer Island shore, Bella Neveah Amoroso Bond had already endured a traumatic short life. The two-and-a-half year old was murdered by her mother’s boyfriend at the end of a tangle of drugs, abuse, and criminal behavior, a Suffolk County prosecutor said Monday at an arraignment hearing in Dorchester District Court.

Michael P. McCarthy, 35, of Quincy, has been charged with murdering Bella, who was known for months only as “Baby Doe,” an unidentified cherubic toddler whose face was familiar to millions via a widely circulated sketch worked up by law enforcement officials. Her mother, Rachelle D. Bond, 40, originally from Fitchburg, has been charged as an accessory to murder after the fact.

“The tragedy of her death is compounded by the fact that her short life ended not by illness or accident but, we believe, by an act of violence in the very place she should have been safest – her home,” Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley said in a press conference last Friday.

In an apartment building on Maxwell Street in Dorchester that they shared, Bond and McCarthy had yelled at the toddler and spanked her, said Assistant District Attorney David Deakin at the joint arraignment. On multiple occasions, he said, Bella was locked in a closet where she screamed to be let out.

While reusing to go to sleep one evening in late May, Bella was being “unruly,” Deakin said. McCarthy, Bond’s live-in boyfriend, went upstairs to calm her down. Soon the noise from Bella’s room ended, and Bond went upstairs to find McCarthy standing over her daughter’s still body, her small face gray and swollen. Investigators believe McCarthy pummeled the girl in the stomach. “She was a demon and it was her time to die,” McCarthy told Bond, according to Deakin.

After threatening to kill Bond if she went to the police, McCarthy stuffed Bella’s body into a garbage bag and put it in the kitchen refrigerator, Deakin said. After a few days, the couple drove to a secluded waterfront stretch in South Boston where McCarthy weighted the bag down and dropped it into the water, Deakin said.  

Bella BondFor the next several days, the two used heroin and remained high, Deakin said. The baby’s body washed up on a beach in late June and lay there for at least a day before it was found by a woman walking her dog along the beach on Deer Island.

The body was clothed in black and white polka-dotted pajamas and placed with “a zebra-print fleece blanket that investigators believe may have been special to her,” according to a State Police report that noted she was believed to be about four years old.

The hunt for her identity spanned at least 36 states and multiple countries, officials said. Genetic testing and pollen analysis seemed to indicate that the baby girl on the shore had lived in Boston. The composite image depicting her likely appearance – big brown eyes, brown wavy hair, rosy cheeks – was viewed more than 50 million times, State Police said. Thousands of tips poured in.

The search for a name ended on Maxwell Street last Thursday, after a tip called in to the Boston Police Homicide Unit led investigators to the girl’s home. The tipster, identified in court as a lifelong friend of McCarthy, and later identified as Michael Sprinsky, had lived with McCarthy and Bond for a short time before Bella was killed, and had been fond of the girl, Deakin said.

Sprinsky spoke with Bond last Wednesday, Deakin said. She said she had been off drugs for the past few days, leading Sprinsky to say encouragingly, “That’s great. You’ll be able to get yourself clean and get Bella back.” He had been told the toddler had been taken by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, Deakin said, as had Bond’s two other children.

Bond broke down and told Sprinsky that McCarthy had killed her daughter, and that she was an accessory to murder, Deakin told the court. With the help of his sister, Sprinsky connected Bella to the image of Baby Doe, whose composite picture he had never seen.

Late last Thursday, police, following the tip and with warrant in hand, entered Unit 2 at 115 Maxwell St., where Bella had lived with her mother and McCarthy, and searched the premises. Bond was later found in Lynn, at Bella’s grandparents’ house. Police found McCarthy at a Boston hospital where he was being treated for an unrelated medical issue. He “continued to maintain that Bella was in DCF custody and that’s all he knew,” Deakin said.

Maxwell Street residents said that police had been interviewing them about a neighbor, but police presence was limited Friday afternoon. An individual with knowledge of the property said there had not been any complaints regarding the unit.

A memorial of balloons, candles, and stuffed animals has grown in front of the home over the last week. The first people to leave anything, three women who did not know the family, placed a balloon and colorful plush butterfly by a tree before the apartment building on Friday. “It was a baby. You don’t do that to a baby,” one said. Another said they had been “obsessed” with the case.

Knowing the toddler was killed so close to home is "definitely uncomfortable," said Faylis Matos, who has lived in the Bonds' neighborhood since she was 13 years old, Matos said she had never seen the mother and daughter at any community events. Nor, she said, had she spoken to anyone who knew them personally.

"There are people not far from here who have lost their kids to violence," she said. For them, hearing that someone would abet the murder of their own child is particularly difficult to understand.

"I think the community recognizes that there needs to be a little bit more communication between neighbors," she said. Matos' community group, Redefining Our Community, hosts block parties and knocks on doors to encourage that kind of interaction between neighbors, something that seems increasingly more necessary, she said.

"If people who had lived on the same street had taken the time to get to know their new neighbors, maybe it wouldn't have taken so long [to identify Bella]," Matos said.

Kim Odom, a minister and resident of the community where Bella lived, lost her 13-year-son, Steven Odom, who was shot and killed Oct. 4, 2007, said, "it is very disturbing that there is such a pattern of children being failed by systems on the adult watch. It 's insanity that every time we hear of our most vulnerable citizens, our children, being impacted by violence of all forms, we rehearse the same questions, even after there has been so many children's lives who should have dictated public health and public safety protocols that comprehensively and uncompromisingly protect them."

Photos of Bella on Bond’s Facebook page, since removed but shown at the district attorney’s press conference, feature a young girl who looks very much like the composite image – she is smiling, on a plastic tricycle, and arranging toppings on a pizza about to be baked.

“The hardest part about this for me is that I will never be able to see or hold my daughter,” Bella’s biological father, 32-year-old Joseph Amoroso, told reporters after the arraignment. Bond had told him about the murder before her arrest, Amoroso said, but he had not reported it. He never met his daughter in person and said he holds the DCF responsible for much of the tragedy.

Bond and McCarthy, who pleaded not guilty to the charges against them, will return to court on Oct. 20. Bond’s bail was set at $1 million cash; McCarthy is being held without bail.