FBI agent shot by booby-trapped wheelchair during bizarre ‘Indiana Jones’ raid
When an FBI agent and three bomb squad officers arrived at a vacant property, nothing could have prepared them for the bizarre array of booby traps and explosives that awaited them. One would soon be hospitalized.
Joseph Charter, the real estate agent responsible for the property, advised police on August 29 that the area was “protected with improvised devices.”
“[It was] much like a scene from the movie ‘Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in which actor Harrison Ford is forced to outrun a giant stone boulder that he inadvertently triggered by a booby-trap switch,” the court complaint said, as cited by Oregon Live. Here, investigating officers were referring to the circular hot tub that was laid on its side and rigged with a tripwire.
Elsewhere on the 15-acre property near Williams, a town of 2,200 people in Josephine County, they found spike strips, a minivan fitted with spring-loaded animal traps, and a rat trap attached to the garage door, which was rigged to fire a shotgun shell at whoever tried to enter.
Having navigated all of these traps, the bomb squad officers and FBI agent carried out an explosive entry on the home, blasting open the fortified front door. Upon entering, the team were confronted by a booby-trapped wheelchair.
One of the officers accidentally triggered a tripwire, setting off an improvised explosive device made out of shotgun cartridges and other shrapnel that was attached to the wheelchair. The officer was rushed to a nearby hospital where a .410-gauge shotgun pellet was discovered in their leg after an X-ray was carried out.
The man behind the orchestrated chaos was named as 66-year-old Gregory Rodvelt, a former resident of the home who was forced to forfeit the property following a 2016 court case in which Rodvelt’s 90-year-old mother filed an abuse complaint against him. It resulted in a $2.1-million judgement in her favor.
Rodvelt had been incarcerated in Maricopa County Jail in Arizona since April 2017 for a separate assault case following an armed standoff. He refused a court-appointed attorney, but was released from jail for two weeks in August to prepare the property for sale.
Rodvelt now faces one felony count of assault on a federal officer in addition to the pre-existing charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest, and failure to mark explosives from the 2017 standoff.
Private military contractors have conducted a full sweep of the house of horrors in the weeks since the officer was injured.
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