After a lengthy negotiation, Kenneth Bellamy agreed to remove the barricade of furniture blocking entrance to his North York shelter hotel room and allow the Emergency Task Force to enter and place him under arrest.
But where was his girlfriend, Tracy Iannuccilli?
It was early afternoon on Friday, June 30, 2023. Shelter staff had told police the couple in unit 1030 were being evicted that day but no one had seen Iannuccilli since dinnertime on Wednesday and they were concerned.
Court heard Bellamy had barricaded himself inside their room and warned the first officers on the scene that he’d jump out the window if they tried to come in.
Emergency Task Force Const. Yiorgo Christodoulou, trained in negotiating with persons in crisis, arrived at 1:10 p.m. to take over.
As he built a rapport with Bellamy, the man inside the unit slid a knife under the door.
“I don’t wanna hurt anyone,” he wept. “I’m sorry, Jesus.”
He told Christodoulou that he had no other weapons. He shared that he was an artist, had been drinking and taking drugs, hadn’t eaten in two days, and he insisted his outstanding warrant for assault was due to people making up lies and not allowing him to stay with them under a bridge.
“Please, please forgive me,” Bellamy kept slurring on the audio captured by the officer and played in a downtown courtroom.
Christodoulou, likely assuming Bellamy was talking about barricading himself inside, reassured him there was nothing to apologize for – he’d had a rough time, with his mom dying recently, with his girlfriend, with being evicted from the shelter.
“You don’t need forgiveness, okay? People deal with this kind of stuff all the time and it’s normal. You’re not the only person that goes through this, okay?” the officer told him.
“I know I’m in trouble and I accept it,” Bellamy said resignedly at one point.
How right he was.
Bellamy has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of his domestic partner. According to the agreed statement of facts, he admits to causing the death of Iannuccilli, 44.
As Bellamy was being handcuffed that day on the outstanding assault warrant – a charge that was later withdrawn – the ETF audio picked up the background voices of other ETF members entering the unit.
“There’s a body. ‘Hey, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ F—, we’re gonna need medics in here,” an officer can be heard saying urgently on the recording. “Somebody’s unconscious in the bathroom. Medics. Medics. We have an unconscious person. I think they’re VSA (vital signs absent).”
ETF Const. Gregory Payne made the grisly discovery.
While the others dealt with Bellamy, he and another officer were tasked with clearing the unit’s bathroom. He told the jury they found the door was closed and blocked by a table that they removed.
When he entered the small bathroom, he noticed bags stored under the sink and something under a pink or beige blanket.
“We thought someone was hiding under the sink,” Payne recalled.
Whoever it was didn’t respond to their commands to come out with their hands up, he said, so he took out his Taser and the other officer ripped away the blanket.
“I immediately observed a naked, lifeless body,” Payne testified, as one of Iannuccilli’s family members began to sob in the courtroom. “The female had a towel wrapped around her entire head and two stab wounds to the right shoulder, about one inch long, but they weren’t bleeding. They were dry.”
In his opening statement, prosecutor Kene Canton told the jury Iannuccilli suffered 15 stab wounds, most to the head and neck, and was killed sometime on or between June 28 and June 30, 2023.
As Bellamy was being escorted out of the room and taken to the building’s elevator, the body-worn camera of Const. Ryan Young captured his chillingly calm question.
“How long do you think I’ll do?”
The trial continues.