Well here’s a story you don’t run across every day: an FBI agent was recently shot by a booby-trapped wheelchair while searching the former residence of 67-year old Gregory Lee Rodvelt.
Rodvelt was forced to forfeit his home in Williams, Oregon, after his 90-year old mother filed a civil suit against him for elder abuse a few years back. This past September, a real estate lawyer enlisted to sell the Rodvelt’s house called local law enforcement to tell them that he’d found a sign posted on the property that warned it was “protected with improvised devices.”
From The Oregonian:
They slipped by the minivan outfitted with the spring-loaded jaws of animal snares and avoided a circular hot tub turned on its side and designed to roll over trespassers who triggered a tripwire — something reminiscent of “a scene from the movie ‘Indiana Jones.'”
But the FBI special agent and three state police bomb technicians never made it past the empty wheelchair inside the manufactured home they entered on the southern Oregon property, court records say.
The agent was rushed to a hospital in Grants Pass, about 15 miles away. An X-ray found a .410-gauge shotgun pellet in the agent’s left leg below the knee.
Ow.
Rodvelt, who’s been up shit creek with the law on several occasions in the past, had been serving time in the clink on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, failure to mark explosives and resisting arrest. However, someone had the genius idea to release him for a two-week period so that he could return to his former home and prepare it for sale. It’s most likely during this time that Rodvelt had the chance to rig the property up like a methed-out Rube Goldberg machine.
Image via pxhere