WEST CHESTER — A Chester County Common Pleas Court jury on Friday began deliberating the case of a Uwchlan man accused of stabbing a neighbor during a street-side confrontation, the culmination of an ongoing dispute between two neighbors over a fence and some trees.
Glenn Phillips is facing charges of the attempted murder of Charles Oswald — whose property abuts his home — as well as aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, and possession of an instrument of crime.
The incident, which Phillips has not denied, saw him stab Oswald multiple times with a folding knife in front of the Phillips family home in the summer of 2023. Phillips has contended that he was acting in self-defense after Oswald drove to his home and confronted him in the street, punching him in the face.
Oswald, who lives in West Whiteland, suffered a collapsed lung, a tube in his chest, and internal bleeding, his wife, Marnie Oswald, said after the incident. A doctor who testified at the trial said that if the cuts had been just slightly different, he could have died.
The dispute between the two men apparently concerned competing claims about a fence that Phillips and his wife contend is on their property, which abuts Oswald’s yard but which Oswald allegedly had refused to move, and over trees that the Oswalds say overhang their driveway from the Phillips’ yard and put them at risk.
In closing arguments on Friday at the conclusion of the week-long trial, the two sides presented the six men and six women jurors with differing perspectives on how they should view the stabbing.
Assistant District Attorney Kimberly Kaelin, who led the prosecution with colleague Kaitlyn Michalek, told the panel that “you don’t get to stab your neighbor just because you don’t like him. And we are here because of that. (Phillips) escalated a neighborhood dispute into an almost murder.”
Using a PowerPoint presentation to make her case, showing photos that were taken of the incident from surveillance cameras, and at one point wielding the 6-inch-long knife as a demonstration, Kaelin showed the jury how she said Phillips used “force and momentum” to inflict injuries on Oswald during their confrontation.
“The defendant was on an active crusade to get rid of Mr. Oswald,” she said, at the same time conceding that Oswald himself had acted inappropriately during the long-running dispute. “This was not justified in any way, shape, or form.”
Meanwhile, in his closing, defense attorney Ryan Hyde of Exton that it was Oswald’s near-relentless badgering of Phillips, his wife, and their two children, that created the climate that resulted in his client being forced to take action.
“Over two years, Charles Oswald began a torture campaign against the Phillips family,” he said. “Children were involved.” Even if during their encounter Oswald had not actually threatened Phillips, his intent to do so was clear.
“You can menace someone without using menacing language,” said Hyde. “Over a period of two years, he savaged these people’s lives. The Phillips felt trapped.”
His client was forced to use deadly force against Oswald when the other man punched him in the face. “The question for you is what was my client’s intent when he did it? He didn’t want to kill him. He just wanted to be left alone.”
Phillips, 55, who testified in his own defense, is a security consultant who has been free on bail since the stabbing but who has had to relocate from the Rennard Drive home he shared with his family since his arrest.
Uwchlan Sgt. Stephen Saraceni wrote in an arrest affidavit that he responded to a call for a stabbing at about 5:45 p.m. on June 15, 2023, at the intersection of Rennard Drive and Biddle Drive. There, he saw Oswald standing next to his white Transit work van with no shirt on. He had a large amount of blood on his neck and chest area, and the officer saw a large cut on the right side of his neck.
Saraceni also saw Phillips sitting on a curb across the street from his home in the 400 block of Rennard Drive. Close to him was a large pool of blood in the roadway, the officer wrote. He was able to determine that there had been an altercation between the men and noted in the report that “Phillips stabbed and slashed Oswald with a folding knife, causing significant injury, namely two stab wounds to his torso and back and a slash to the right side of his neck.”
Indeed, Phillips did not deny the accusation when Saraceni approached him outside his home on an otherwise quiet cul-de-sac in the North Valley Hills neighborhood of Uwchlan, the officer added.
He and Oswald “got into it,” after Oswald appeared in his van, looped around the cul-de-sac, and began honking his horn outside Phillips’ home. “They exchanged words, and Glenn said Oswald punched him in the face,” Saraceni said in prior testimony.
The violence of the attack is out of the ordinary for Uwchlan, where serious crime is low, even though it is among the county’s most populated municipalities. For the past five years, there have been fewer than 20 aggravated assaults in the township, and no homicides in the same period, according to state police records. Neither Phillips nor Oswald has any criminal history in the county, according to court records.
Problems between the neighbors go back several months, according to both sides.
At a May 10, 2023 meeting of the West Whiteland Board of Supervisors, Phillips’ wife, Angela Phillips, appeared to discuss the ongoing property dispute between her family and Oswald, over the fence, which encroached on her yard. She said numerous attempts in 2023 to get the fence removed from her property, including directives from the township, had failed, and Oswald was threatening legal action.
“I’ve tried everything to work this out,” she told the supervisors. She said Oswald had harassed her and her family over the months. “Please, please help me regain my property rights,” she said, her voice audibly shaking.
Marnie Oswald said in an interview after the assault, however, that the fence had been moved in the past few weeks, and claimed it had encroached on the Phillips property by only a few inches. Now, however, she said she was dealing with the trauma of a serious attack on her 44-year-old husband allegedly committed by her backyard neighbor, she said at the time.
To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544.
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