A 72-year-old man was sentenced to 12 and a half years in federal prison after he booby-trapped his former manufactured home in southern Oregon and injured an FBI agent.
After Gregory Lee Rodvelt lost his property in rural Josephine County in an elder abuse case, he didn’t want anyone to take it without a fight, so he placed homemade spike strips at the bottom of the driveway, rigged a rat trap to fire a shotgun shell when someone tried to open the door to a detached garage and set other traps, prosecutors said.
State and FBI bomb technicians had gone to the 15-acre property off Dreamhill Drive in Williams, a town of 2,200 people, at the request of a real estate lawyer who was working to sell it, according to court records.
Federal investigators said Rodvelt also set up a minivan to block the gate, affixed steel animal traps to a gate post, barred the home’s windows from inside and set up a wheelchair in the entryway to fire a .410-caliber shotgun shell.
The technicians used an explosive charge to breach the front door and carefully entered the home only to bump the wheelchair, authorities said. The shot hit FBI bomb technician Andrew Sellers below the knee.
In June, a jury found Rodvelt guilty of assaulting a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon and using and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.
Defense lawyer Devin Huseby urged U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane to consider his client’s age and health and sentence Rodvelt to three years, and then home confinement as a condition of his subsequent federal supervision.
Huseby also argued that the FBI agent’s leg wound wasn’t serious, based on FBI reports that said Sellers’ leg pain was “minimal to moderate,” that the wound didn’t affect his ability to walk soon afterward and the injury healed on its own.
Prosecutors Judith R. Harper argued for a sentence of 15 years and three months. Harper wrote in a sentencing memo that a 3-millimeter metallic pellet struck a vein in Sellers’ leg and remains embedded after a doctor decided against removing it.
McShane picked a sentence much closer to Harper’s recommendation during a hearing in federal court in Medford.
Nathan J. Lichvarcik, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Eugene and Medford branch offices, said it was fortunate that Rodvelt’s traps “did not kill a law enforcement officer or community member.”
“Today’s sentence is a just punishment for a serious crime,” Lichvarcik said in a statement.
Kieran L. Ramsey, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon, called Rodvelt’s “intricate and deadly concealed traps” a “vicious” attempt to prevent FBI agents from doing their job.
“These were no joke,” he said. “Mr. Rodvelt knew he was breaking the law and his reprehensible actions are what landed him this sentence.’'
The FBI, with help from the Oregon State Police and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigated the case.
