Loud sex finally too much for cancer-stricken neighbors

Some nights, before two of her daughters went to bed, Tanya Saylor would give them headphones.

That would help block the noise — the music, the threats and the sex noises.

The sounds were coming from the other side of a wall the room shared with a neighboring row home in Red Lion. Sometimes they lasted until 3 a.m.

"It's pretty pathetic when you have to have a protocol due to your neighbor's actions," Saylor said Monday.

Saylor, her terminally ill husband and her five children — all between the ages of 9 and 17 and one of whom has cancer — dealt with the noise for two years, she said.

And in April, the neighbor, 25-year-old Amanda Marie Warfel, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and harassment charges for incidents that took place in February and March, according to charging documents.

Those charges were reduced to non-traffic citations, according to District Judge John H. Fishel's office. A charge of ethnic intimidation — originally filed against Warfel in connection with a Feb. 28 incident — was dropped.

Two of Saylor's daughters — a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old — share a room in their row home in the 100 block of West Gay Street. That room shares a wall with Warfel's room, she said.

When the noise first became an issue about two years ago, Saylor said she would knock on the door and ask Warfel to quiet down. It didn't help.

Warfel would call her daughters names and threaten them, she said. As she was having sex, she would describe the acts loudly enough for the girls to hear, she said.

On March 21, Warfel was "loudly fornicating and banging around her bedroom to the degree that the victims' dresser and her own bed shook," documents state.

A family member knocked on the common wall, but Warfel yelled back and the noise became louder, documents state.

On Feb. 28 around 11:15 p.m., Warfel made "racist comments" and ignored requests to turn down her music, according to charging documents. One of Saylor's daughters, who was trying to sleep, again asked Warfel to turn the music down, and Warfel allegedly responded by using derogatory language. The daughter is black, documents state.

But it wasn't about the racial comments, Saylor said. Not really.

"We're not a family that gets easily offended," she said.

It was about the impact the situation was having on her family.

"She harassed my kids for two years," Saylor said. "We let it go for two years. … I shouldn't have let it go that long. I should have started calling the police a year ago."

Warfel's loudness, she said, would keep her two daughters up so late that one would have trouble getting to school on time the next morning. On two occasions, state police wrote notes to the school to excuse her lateness, she said.

Her 17-year-old daughter, who has cancer, needed to be quarantined after getting treatment. She stayed in the room for 10 days in January because "she had to be isolated up there," Saylor said.

During that time, Warfel had sex "non-stop, making sure that my daughter heard," she said.

"I couldn't do anything," Saylor said. "I couldn't be around her; nobody could."

And the mother of five hardly ever saw Warfel, who stayed cooped up in the neighboring row home, she said. The first time she had seen her in a while was at the preliminary hearing in April.

Warfel remained in York County Prison, where she is set to be released June 20.

A hearing for a second case of disorderly conduct, which police say occurred March 21, still needs to be rescheduled, according to Fishel's office.