MEDFORD, Ore. — Five years after rigging his former home in the community of Williams with multiple booby traps, a southern Oregon man has been found guilty in federal court for assaulting a federal officer and using and discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence.
According to court documents, 71-year-old Gregory Lee Rodvelt had lost the home in a lawsuit. After learning that someone had been appointed to take over and sell the property, he littered the house with improvised traps meant to harass or maim interlopers.
On Sept. 7, 2018, bomb technicians from Oregon State Police and the FBI went to the property in order to clear it. They arrived to find a minivan blocking the main gate, with steel animal traps affixed to a gate post and under the van's hood. The property also featured homemade spike strips, which the court-appointed custodian of the property had run over previously.
As the technicians neared Rodvelt's former house, federal prosecutors said, they found a hot tub that had been placed on its side and rigged to roll down on whoever opened the gate.
"(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," prosecutors' complaint read.
Windows of the house had been barred from the inside, and the only entrances to the home were security doors installed at the front and rear. The front door had what appeared to be bullet holes, prosecutors said, created by shots fired from inside the house.
In a garage, technicians found a rat trap that had been "modified to accept a shotgun shell." While it was unloaded at the time, prosecutors said, it had been connected to the main garage door so it could be tripped when the door opened.
The bomb technicians and two other law enforcement officers resorted to using an explosive charge to breach the home's front door. As they picked their way inside, they found a wheelchair sitting in the front entryway. When the wheelchair was bumped, prosecutors said, it triggered a homemade shotgun device that fired off a .410 shotgun shell.
An FBI bomb technician was hit below the knee by the blast. Officers rendered first aid to the FBI tech and had him taken to the hospital.
At the time that federal prosecutors first filed their complaint, Rodvelt was already in custody in Arizona, facing trial after an alleged armed standoff with law enforcement.
The federal charge of "assaulting a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon" is punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison. Rodvelt's other charge, "using and discharging a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence," is punishable by up to life in prison.
A federal jury found Rodvelt guilty of both charges on Friday. He has not yet been sentenced, with that hearing scheduled for a later date.
