City canned him 9 days prior to slay

NINE DAYS before exacting revenge on his former colleagues at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, Dr. Henry Bello had been fired from a job assisting AIDS and HIV patients for the city.

The troubled doctor earned a $38,617 salary as a caseworker for the Human Resources Administration, making home visits to patients. He was hired on Sept. 6, 2016, off a Civil Service list and stopped showing up to work on April 11, City Hall spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said.

After multiple attempts to reach him, Bello, 45, was officially terminated on June 21. Nine days later, he opened fire in the hospital using an AM-15, killing a doctor and wounding six others before killing himself.

The new details of Bello’s career added to the portrait of the disgruntled doctor who had lived in homeless shelters, struggled with money and had runins with the law.

In 2000, he filed for bankruptcy in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Public records revealed that in 2013, Bello lived at the Bowery Mission Men’s Center on Avenue D, which is transitional housing dedicated to formerly homeless men struggling with drug addiction.

Last year, Bello also lived at a homeless shelter on E. 30th St., records show.

The doctor was forced to resign from the hospital in February 2015 after being accused of sexually harassing a co-worker. He left the shelter system in March and moved into permanent housing thanks to a Section 8 voucher, a city official said.

The New York Times reported on Bello’s troubled past Sunday. A spokesman for BronxLebanon, Errol Schneer, said the hospital had run its standard background check on Bello before hiring him. A 2004 arrest for sex abuse was not a red flag because Bello had pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor offense of unlawful imprisonment.

“There was no record of any conviction for sexual abuse,” Schneer said.

The same incident also did not result in a red flag when the Human Resources Administration checked his background.

“His check did not reveal his 2004 arrest because he pled to a lower charge that didn’t show up as a disqualifying offense in a background check,” Rothenberg said.