A former southern Oregon property owner has been charged after authorities say an FBI agent sent to the property was shot from a booby-trapped wheelchair.
Law enforcement officers responded to the home in the small town of Williams on September 7 at the request of a real estate lawyer tasked with selling the property, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported on Monday.
A criminal complaint filed in US District Court in Medford says officers found traps throughout the property from spike strips to a circular hot tub turned on its side and rigged to roll over anyone who triggered a trip wire.
"(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 complaint says.
After making it past the hot tub, a bomb squad and FBI agent approached the property's manufactured home and blasted open the fortified front door.
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Inside the home a wheelchair outfitted with a fishing line, shotgun ammunition and other items got pushed and triggered the explosion that wounded the agent, according to court documents.
An X-ray found a .410-guage shotgun pellet in the agent's leg.
Authorities said the makeshift weapons were created by Gregory Rodvelt, 66, who was forced to forfeit his property as part of an elder abuse case involving his mother.
Rodvelt is in Arizona's Maricopa County Jail, where he is in the midst of an assault trial in a separate case related to an alleged armed stand-off.
Rodvelt had been in the Arizona jail since April 2017 but courts released him in mid-August for two weeks so he could prepare to turn over the property.
In the weeks since the agent was injured, a team of private contractors consisting of former military experts had inspected the property, the real estate lawyer said.
