Prosecutor: Bella’s mom terrified of beau
The mother of murdered toddler Bella Bond was too terrified to turn her boyfriend in for killing her daughter, because shortly afterward he beat her and worked over a Dudley Square drug dealer right in front of her, prosecutors hope to tell jurors at his trial.
Rachelle Dee Bond, 41, is expected to testify against Michael Patrick McCarthy, 36, when his murder trial gets under way May 22.
In a preparation meeting last month with investigators, assistant Suffolk District Attorney David Deakin said Bond described the alleged violent encounters involving McCarthy that took place after her daughter’s body was stuffed in a trash bag and tossed in the Atlantic in the summer of 2015 — before Bond went to authorities that September.
McCarthy is not Bella Bond’s father.
“The commonwealth submits that the evidence is relevant to a jury’s understanding of Ms. Bond’s reasons for not reporting the murder to authorities until September 2015,” Deakin explained in a Suffolk Superior Court filing obtained by the Herald.
Deakin said Bond’s description of the drug dealer’s beatdown in Roxbury’s Dudley Square appears to be corroborated by two text messages McCarthy sent another man in August 2015.
In one text, McCarthy wrote, “I beat a (racial slur) head in wit (sic) a hammer down there few weeks bak (sic),” the court document states. In the second, “Saw long hair little dog, but no hammer or upper cut broke all his teeth.”
Deakin will also seek Judge Janet L. Sanders’ OK “to introduce evidence of the defendant’s (McCarthy) interest in the occult, including demonology and satanism.”
Documents the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office filed in support of that motion are sealed.
Bond, who is not accused of taking part in her daughter’s slaying, pleaded guilty in February to being an accessory after the fact to murder and larceny for cashing $1,300 in state welfare checks she continued to receive to help care for her child.
She will be sentenced after McCarthy’s trial concludes.