SALEM TOWNSHIP, WAYNE COUNTY - Pennsylvania's Attorney General`s Office charged 85-year-old Bill Neville with breaking Pennsylvania`s clean streams law by polluting a stream near his 34 unit mobile home park in Salem Township Wayne County.
If convicted, Neville faces seven years in prison.
"How would you like to be on a place for 85 years, and have these people across the street from us be after us all the time?" asked Neville.
He's referring to Louise Ann and Roy Montalvan who live across the street from the mobile home park. The Montalvan's claim Neville polluted the stream so badly at times, they couldn`t even go outside.
"If you were out for any time it was horrible, said Louise Ann. "The smell was so bad you would gag."
According to a probable cause affidavit, water samples from the stream found levels of pollution beginning in 2008.
The affidavit claims, Bill Neville twice admitted to law enforcement he occasionally turned a valve to discharge raw sewage from the trailer park`s treatment system or from his home directly into the stream.
As recently as November 2012, agents found sludge and toilet paper discharging into the stream.
"When you admit to two Department of Environmental Protection officers that you had a valve and you were willingly discharging it for years, you know exactly what you were doing," said Louise Ann Montalvan.
"My father`s never been in trouble his whole life," countered his daughter Nancy Haines. "85 years old and he`s getting treated like a common criminal."
Neville`s daughter says she and her father just spent $150,000 upgrading the park`s treatment system, just to be in line with the law.
"We fixed it, let it alone," said Bill Neville, who claims he had all the proper permits and permission to discharge sewage 36 years ago.
But no one can find those permits, at the Salem Township offices and Neville says the people who signed them are dead.