Bella Bond's mother wanted to be taken 'out of reality' after daughter's death

BOSTON -- (WBZ) -- The mother of a 2-year-old girl whose body washed up on Deer Island two years ago told jurors she was taking heroin very heavily to deal with her daughter's death and wanted to be taken “out of reality.”

Rachelle Bond wept on the witness stand Monday morning when asked to identify her daughter, Bella Bond, in a photo.

“She was always happy,” she said through tears, about the girl once known by the public only as “Baby Doe.” “We were always happy.”

Rachelle testified last week that she saw her ex-boyfriend, Michael McCarthy, kill Bella in 2015. She told the court Monday about the moment she found out, while watching the news, that her daughter's body had been found.

McCarthy, 37, is charged with first-degree murder in Bella's death. Prosecutors say he struck and killed her because he was obsessed with the occult and believed she was a “demon.” The defense, however, claims Rachelle Bond killed her daughter.

Rachelle described what a typical day was like with Bella–before McCarthy moved in.

She said she initially thought she and her daughter could be happy living with McCarthy.

In her testimony on Friday, Rachelle told the court about the night Bella died. She said she saw McCarthy go into Bella's room and punch her in the stomach because she didn't want to go to bed.

“What the [expletive] did you do?” Bond said she yelled to McCarthy.

After Bella was killed, Rachelle said McCarthy put her body into a duffel bag with weights and threw it into Boston Harbor.

Rachelle said Tuesday that she didn't alert authorities about her daughter's death because McCarthy had threatened to kill her–a threat she took seriously because, she said, he had killed Bella.

She also said McCarthy told her nobody would believe her because of her past troubles with police and the Department of Children and Families, which she admitted in court last week had already taken two of her children due to neglect.

Rachelle, who detailed her descent into drug use in her testimony Friday, said she was using her disability checks to purchase heroin and inject it up to seven times a day to deal with Bella's death.

She said McCarthy got her into Alex Jones conspiracy theories in the time after the murder.

Rachelle said that when Joe Amoroso, Bella's biological father, visited in September looking for his daughter, she told him she was visiting her godparents.

When Bella's body was found by a woman walking her dog on a Deer Island beach in 2015, authorities issued a computer-generated image of the then-unidentified girl, who came to be known as “Baby Doe” by the millions who shared those photos on social media.

The girl was later identified as Bella Bond after, prosecutors say, Rachelle told a former friend of McCarthy's that he had killed the girl.

Rachelle told the court that she told Michael Sprinsky, who had lived with the couple before Bella's death, that Bella had been taken by DCF. When Sprinsky told her she could get her daughter back, she told him she couldn't–because McCarthy had killed her.

She said she told Sprinsky because she knew he would believe her.

She said police came to her house, but she left through the back window–because, she said, she wanted to tell Amoroso everything first. She told police she first saw the “Baby Doe” photos on TV at Amoroso's parents' house.

Not long after, she was interviewed and arrested by police, who charged her with being an accessory to murder after the fact.

Rachelle agreed to testify for the prosecution in exchange for a guilty plea in the case, and could walk free on time served at the end of the trial. She pleaded guilty to helping dispose of Bella's body.