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EDITORIAL

A just verdict for Bella Bond

Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley spoke to the media after Michael P. McCarthy was convicted.Matt West/Pool

SUFFOLK COUNTY PROSECUTORS can take pride in the hard-fought conviction they won on Monday, when a jury found Michael P. McCarthy guilty of second-degree murder in the death of 2-year-old Bella Bond. The case of the unidentified girl found on the beach in Winthrop became national news, and it was only through painstaking investigation over many months that authorities were able to establish her identity, arrest her killer, and put him behind bars.

The case against McCarthy, 37, the former boyfriend of Bond’s mother, wasn’t a sure thing. Prosecutors relied on the testimony of the girl’s mother, Rachelle Bond, 40, a recovering heroin addict who did not report Bella’s death and changed her story several times. But after five days of deliberation, the jurors decided she was credible: McCarthy, also a heroin user at the time, had punched the child, killed her, then thrown her in the ocean. He’d threatened to kill Rachelle Bond if she told anyone.

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McCarthy did not testify in his defense, but his lawyer tried to convince jurors that Rachelle Bond had actually killed her child. He will be sentenced Wednesday. Bond, who admitted to lesser charges as part of a plea agreement, will be sentenced on Tuesday, but is not expected to receive prison time beyond what she has already served.

That deal left a bitter taste for some, who wanted to see Rachelle Bond pay a greater price for her role in covering up her daughter’s killing. The plea agreement is the sort of ugly compromise that prosecutors have to make, and it’s hard to fault Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley for making it. It ensured at least a measure of justice, and Rachelle Bond will still always have to live with the knowledge that she brought her daughter’s killer into her life.

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Coincidentally, on Sunday, mourners dedicated a monument to Bella Bond at Deer Island. It’s tragic how much more attention this little girl has received in death — from law enforcement, and the public at large — than she ever did in life. But the sad reality is that there are more vulnerable children in Massachusetts, and other horrific caretakers. One can only hope that McCarthy’s sentence makes one of them think twice, or that the monument to Bella Bond’s memory jars a bystander to act.