Orville H. Bullitt kept a low profile in his Davie neighborhood, except when it came to the young girls who live in the house behind his.

Bullitt, who was arrested and charged this week with 144 counts of possession of child pornography, invited the girls, ages 7 and 9, over to his house for ice cream, and to swim in his backyard pool, said Kim Rosado, the girls’ mother.

“I’m nauseous,’’ Rosado said Friday after learning of Bullitt’s arrest and the charges against him, adding that she never let her daughters accept his invitation.

Bullitt was arrested Feb. 13 at his mother’s house in Kissimmee, where he had gone to visit. He was booked into the Osceola County Jail, but will be prosecuted in Broward. His bond is set at $1.4 million. Bullitt had no job, police said, and likely lived off a trust fund or his family.

A woman who answered the phone at the Bullitts’ home in Kissimmee declined comment.

Though police announced the arrest and charges on Friday, the investigation into Bullitt’s child pornography activities began “a couple of years’’ ago, said Addy Villanueva, special agent in charge of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Miami operations center.

FDLE investigators, working with a multi-agency task force that included Pembroke Pines and Davie police, first took notice of Bullitt when he “advertised’’ child pornography images on an online file-sharing site, said Will Hernandez, an FDLE special agent. Police traced the images to Bullitt, who was living in Pembroke Pines at the time.

About one month later, FDLE agents executed a search warrant at Bullitt’s Pembroke Pines house in the 7600 block of Northwest 12th Street and found at least 144 images of child pornography stored on a laptop, thumb drives and external discs.

“Investigators found pictures that showed child victims in various sexual depictions,’’ Villanueva said.

Hernandez said the children in the images appear to be under the age of 10, and include boys and girls. It is unclear, and police would not elaborate, whether Bullitt produced the images himself, or obtained them from a third-party source.

Police believe at least some of the images are of South Florida children, though they would not explain why.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,’’ Hernandez said. “Are they pictures of him? Are they children from South Florida?’’

Hernandez added that, “In our experience and in our training ... these individuals who possess [child pornography] are likely hands-on offenders.’’

Prosecutors took more than a year to bring charges, Hernandez said, because the FDLE’s cyber crimes division is understaffed and Bullitt had an extensive amount of files.

This is not Bullitt’s first time facing criminal charges. In 1985, he was convicted in Miami-Dade for sexual molestation of a child younger than 12. He received 10 years probation.

Bullitt did not qualify as a sexual offender because he completed his sentence prior to October 1997, the date when Florida law began to require persons convicted of child sex crimes to register and be listed on the FDLE’s sexual offenders and predators list, which is a public record accessible online at fdle.state.fl.us.

Bullitt also was charged in 2003 with two counts of sexual battery on a minor in Miami-Dade, but the charges were later dropped, according to case records.

In addition to Davie and Pembroke Pines, Bullitt also has lived in Miami Shores, North Miami and Osceola County. He has been married and divorced three times in Miami-Dade, according to records.

For the past year or so, Bullitt has rented a home in the 6200 block of Southwest 38th Court in Davie, about two blocks from Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary and Nova Blanche Forman Elementary schools.

“There’s nothing but kids walking past here all the time,’’ said Rosado, whose daughters attend Nova Blanche Forman.

Rosado said her 17-year-old daughter told her she and Bullitt had a conversation over the backyard fence in which he asked her about her past sexual experiences. He also invited her to swim in his pool, but told her to not tell her mother about it.

The eldest daughter also said she often saw Bullitt sitting in his back yard, with the French patio doors to his house open. What she saw inside gave her “the creeps,’’ she said.

“He has all kinds of children’s toys,’’ she said. “Legos and other things.’’

Bullitt’s other neighbors, however, said they knew little about the quiet man who would leave his house late at night and return at predawn, usually driving a maroon-colored van fitted with a wheelchair lift.

Police ask that anyone with information about Bullitt’s activities call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 800-843-5678.