Exploding Wheelchair Wounds FBI Agent at House With Booby-Trapped Hot Tub

The house on Dreamhill Drive was a nightmare waiting to happen.

Outside, a minivan rigged with steel animal traps blocked the driveway. Near the home, a gate was booby-trapped to send a circular hot tub rolling toward anyone who opened it, like the boulder that bore down on Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Neither trap ensnared the bomb experts who visited the home in southwest Oregon last month, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. But the team ran into trouble inside, where someone nudged a wheelchair, triggering a loud explosion that sent shotgun pellets flying.

“I’m hit!” yelled one of the experts, an FBI agent, according to the affidavit, part of a federal lawsuit against the home’s previous owner, Gregory Lee Rodvelt.

The agent, whose name was redacted from the document, had been shot in the leg. He was treated at a hospital, where an X-ray revealed a small pellet-shaped object below his left knee, and later released.

In the affidavit, the government says that Rodvelt committed assault on a federal officer in setting those and other traps around the house and property in Williams, Oregon.

Rodvelt, 67, had been arrested in Arizona in 2017 and charged with unlawful possession of explosives, but he was released in August after he was ordered by a judge to surrender the Oregon house, according to the affidavit.

Later that month, a lawyer assigned to clean and sell the house arrived to find a sign outside that warned: This property is protected by improvised devices.

At the lawyer’s request, the FBI bomb expert and three state bomb technicians arrived to inspect the house on Sept. 7, when they found the minivan and the hot tub, as well as a rat trap in the garage, according to the affidavit. The rat trap was not set, but had it been, it would have discharged a shotgun shell when the garage door opened.

After circling the house and finding the windows barred, the team gathered at the front door and opened it with explosives.

Inside, they found the wheelchair and the same kind of fishing line used in some of the other traps, though it was not immediately clear where the line led. Someone mistakenly hit the wheelchair, causing the explosion.

Later that day, an FBI agent tracked down Rodvelt outside an Albertsons grocery store in Surprise, Arizona, and interviewed him about the Oregon house. Rodvelt told the agent about the hot tub trap, which he compared to the “stone rolling down in the Indiana Jones movie.”

The next day, Sept. 8, authorities arrested Rodvelt and executed a search warrant on the property. Rodvelt, who remains in custody in Arizona, could not be reached on Tuesday, and it was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer.

The agent who was shot is back to work, an FBI spokeswoman said.