"A look at Bella before she was Baby Doe" by Patricia Wen, Evan Allen and Nestor Ramos Globe Staff October 03, 2015
Rachelle Bond was 36 years old and homeless, a drug addict and a prostitute, when she stood before a judge in 2012, desperate to stay out of prison.
Hauled into a Boston courthouse that day, Bond had violated every condition of her probation, including an order that she attend a drug rehabilitation program.
But Bond was also three months pregnant, carrying a baby she hoped would be her salvation. Sending Bond back to rehab instead of to prison, her lawyer argued, might be best for both of them.
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Before her gruesome death, Bella Bond lived at the center of a chaotic swirl of adults who all failed her, according to Globe interviews with people whose troubled lives intersected with her own. Her mother’s fragile stability was shaken by the same addiction that had cost her permanent custody of two older children, they said. Even so, state social workers closed child neglect complaints involving Bella relatively quickly, betting on Bond’s capacity to turn her life around.
And, several friends and acquaintances who saw Bond during the summer say her actions in the wake of her daughter’s death belie the claim that she was held captive by the strange, addled man accused of murdering her feisty 2-year-old at bedtime.
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Bella was conceived in a tent at Occupy Boston, according to her biological father, Joseph Amoroso. But soon after the judge sentenced Bond to jail time that day in 2012, Amoroso was gone.
She was a love child, and see, that square really was filled with bums, criminals, degenerates, and all the rest!
I wonder if those kids made it.
A Florida native with an extensive criminal record both there and in Boston, he disappeared down South, occasionally posting photos of Bella on his Facebook page and talking to the child on the phone, but never getting involved in the girl’s life, according to several friends of Bond. He declined to comment for this story....
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Also see: DCF in Disarray
I'm sure the Globe (years of budgets cuts in an economy doing better than most for the last five years? Where did all the money go?) has something to say, and then cue the music.
