My grandson Gus is three years old, about one-and-one-half months older than Bella Bond would have been, had she lived.

On his third birthday, June 15th, Gus celebrated with his mommy and daddy — and me — in his cheerful home in a Washington State small town.

Ten days later, on the other side of the nation, the tiny little body of Bella Bond was found in a trash bag on Deer Island in Winthrop, Massachusetts. No one knew her name. No one seemed to be missing her. She had washed up on this shore.

When little Bella’s third birthday rolled around, on August 6, she didn’t get to celebrate with her family. She was an anonymous “Baby Doe” stored in a morgue.

Then this past weekend, acting on a tip from neighbors, authorities were able to identify the tiny body as that of Bella Neveah Amoroso Bond, and arrested her mother, Rachelle Bond, and her boyfriend Michael McCarthy in connection with Bella’s death.

https://youtu.be/26ugyb6a6Hs

Bella’s young life had been — in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes — “nasty, brutish, and short.” She had been conceived by Rachelle Bond and Joseph Amoroso in a tent during the Occupy Boston event in 2011. And while the Occupy Wall Street movement cursed corporations, it was the taxpayers employed by those corporations who paid for Rachelle Bond’s government benefits, including welfare and Section 8 housing. Bond chalked up a record of over a dozen arrests over the past decade, including assault and theft. She sold drugs to a pregnant woman outside a homeless shelter. And she prostituted herself for drugs, an endeavor which prompted Bella’s baby-daddy, Joseph Amoroso, to leave her.

Because of these transgressions, two of Bond’s older children were taken from her by the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. Bond was also investigated for neglect of Bella, but DCF declined to remove her from the home.

Rachelle Bond eventually hooked up with Michael McCarthy, five years her junior, the man who allegedly punched little Bella in the stomach until she died. He was convinced that the two-year-old was ‘possessed by demons.’ After Bella died both Bond and McCarthy placed her in a plastic bag and stored her in a type of refrigerator before finally disposing of her tiny broken body.

Joseph Amoroso, Bella’s father, appeared with his mother before camera to defend Rachelle Bond.

https://youtu.be/9kK7wcR7y1I

My question is this: where was Joseph Amoroso during Bella’s short and tragic existence? It’s understandable that he would break off his relationship with Rachelle Bond when he discovered that she had become a prostitute, but that had nothing to do with Bella. He knew what crimes Bond had committed, and the criminal activity in which she was involved, so why did he not protect his vulnerable little daughter, his own flesh and blood? Instead, he left her to the whims of a drug-addled mother and her possibly psychotic boyfriend.

Men are supposed to be protectors, and to defend their offspring. But what else would we expect from someone who had adhered to the Occupy pipe dream of a “mutually responsible community,” rather than individual responsibility, which is what Amoroso should have taken with Bella. However, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.” Amoroso is a textbook example of such a man without a chest, and little Bella paid with her life, not only through the direct actions of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, but through the neglect of her own father as well.

So while my grandson Gus enters his first days at preschool, Bella Bond will be laid to rest, although it is unclear at this time who will claim her body. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, is one of ten people who have offered to provide her a burial. How terribly tragic that while little Bella was brutally treated during her short life by her mother, and neglected by her father, strangers have offered to provide tenderness to her in death.