Gregory Rodvelt’s real-estate lawyer called police when he saw the
signs on Rodvelt’s property, which warned that the home was full of
homemade booby traps.
The warnings proved true when an FBI agent investigated the home in September and was shot by a booby-trapped wheelchair.
Rodvelt, a 66-year-old alleged sovereign citizen, has been been
inside Oregon and Arizona courts for years on various charges of
domestic violence and last year for an
armed standoff on a highway.
After his 90-year-old mother filed and won a $2.1 million elder abuse
case against him in 2016, Rodvelt was ordered to sell his home. Instead,
he rigged it with bizarre booby traps, federal authorities claim in a
criminal complaint that likens his residence to
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In
2017, Rodvelt made headlines for barricading himself inside an SUV with
a gun and refusing to leave an Arizona highway. He was charged with
unlawful possession of explosives.
"He continued to yell that he
was not going to comply with officers' commands and that he was not
going to exit the vehicle," Surprise, Arizona police officer Tom
Klarkowski
told local news.
JJ McNab, a researcher on anti-government extremism, classified Rodvelt as a so-called sovereign citizen
in a March 2018 report
on extremist plots. The loosely affiliated sovereign citizen movement
claims its members are not United States citizens, but independent of
the U.S. and its laws. Adherents might preach any number of
anti-government conspiracy theories, such as the idea that they don’t
have to pay taxes because the IRS spells citizens’ names in capital
letters. Sovereign citizens have been linked to a number of
violent attacks on law enforcement.
In 2016, Rodvelt’s mother filed a lawsuit against Rodvelt,
the Oregonian first reported.
His mother won a $2.1 million judgement, the paper reported. In August,
a local judge ordered Rodvelt to forfeit his home, and appointed real
estate attorney Joseph Charter “as the receiver of the property and
authorizing Charter to take possession of the property, clean the
property and ultimately sell the property,” according to court records.
Rodvelt had been jailed awaiting trial for his 2017 standoff with
Arizona police, but was briefly released to help turn over his Oregon
home. Shortly after Rodvelt’s release, Charter stopped by the 15-acre
property, “he noted a sign warning that the property was protected by
improvised devices,” the criminal complaint reads.
Charter called police. Rodvelt has been involved in a series of
violent incidents, and was convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse in
2000.
In 2016,
one of Rodvelt’s friends accused Rodvelt of punching him in the eye for
driving too slowly, leading the friend to shoot Rodvelt until Rodvelt
hid behind a refrigerator.
Police noted Rodvelt’s pending explosives case and called an FBI bomb squad.
When
the bomb squad approached Rodvelt’s home on September 7, “they noted a
minivan parked in a manner as to prevent vehicles from driving past the
front gate.”
The vans were rigged with steel-tooth traps, the kind
“commonly used to trap wild animals.” The group pressed on until the
reached a gate, which was attached to a trigger switch, which was
attached to a precariously balanced hot tub.
“Upon closer
examination, the technicians discovered that the spa was rigged in such a
manner that when the gate was opened it would activate a mechanical
trigger that would cause the spa to roll towards the person at the gate
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 reads.
The garage contained rat traps that could fire
bullets when the garage door opened. The group exploded Rodvelt’s front
door, and found tripwire immediately inside. None of the agents are sure
what triggered a wheelchair to start rolling toward them. Before they
could respond, the chair exploded, firing a pellet into one FBI agent’s
leg.
But Rodvelt wasn’t on the property. Police in Surprise,
Arizona, the same town where he’d been involved in an armed standoff
against police, arrested him at a grocery store later that day on
charges of assaulting a federal officer.
Asked about the booby
traps in his home, Rodvelt cited Indiana Jones as the inspiration for
his hot tub trap, and referenced other booby traps (more tripwires, a
spike strip that would destroy car tires) that investigators hadn’t
discovered on their first sweep of the property.
When investigators asked whether they should be aware of any remaining booby traps, Rodvelt hesitated.
“I would not race right in,” he answered.
Full Article & Source:
Sovereign Citizen Lured FBI Into Home With ‘Indiana Jones’ Booby Traps
