Bella’s dad says Bond warned him to shut up

The father of slain tot Bella Bond said the child’s mother “punched me in the head and told me to shut the (expletive) up before I get her bagged” after admitting to him the daughter he hoped to build a life with was dead.

“She told me, ‘Bella is dead.’ I flipped out. I punched a concrete pillar,” Joseph Amoroso testified yesterday of the gut-wrenching news he was blindsided by on Sept. 17, 2015, at the Ashmont MBTA Station in Dorchester.

It was the first glimpse 15 jurors seated in the murder trial of Michael P. McCarthy had of Amoroso, 34, a former crack addict and convicted thief who is currently on probation for domestic abuse.

Following testimony this morning by retiring Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Henry Nields about Bella’s inconclusive autopsy, Amoroso will retake the stand.

Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet L. Sanders ruled yesterday she will allow Amoroso to testify today that his daughter’s mother, Rachelle Bond, 41, told him, “Bella was being a bitch” the night she was killed in June 2015.

Also, that Bond told him she wrapped the dead tot in a blanket after prosecutors say McCarthy, her live-in boyfriend, beat Bella to death.

Amoroso said he and Bond were both homeless when they met outside a Copley Square 7-Eleven in May 2010.

“She was asking people for spare change,” he recalled.

While Bond was pregnant with Bella, Amoroso met his current wife and moved to Florida. After two years’ in a men’s ministry in Georgia trying to clean himself up, Amoroso said he took a Greyhound Bus back to Boston in August 2015 in the hopes of meeting Bella for the first time.

On Sept. 16, 2015, a week after she’d told him their daughter was staying with her godparents on Cape Cod, Amoroso said he was “bawling” as he pleaded in vain to Bond, “I want to take my daughter to the park. I want to buy her ice cream. I want to put clothes on her back.”

When Bond turned him away with the promise to be in touch, Amoroso said, “I knew in my heart something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t going to give up.”

STAFF PHOTO BY PATRICK WHITTEMORE DAD TESTIFIES: Joseph Amoroso, the father of the late Bella Bond, testifies yesterday during the murder trial of Michael P. McCarthy, who is accused of murdering the little girl.