The first time armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed laid out the rules of firearm safety to the cast and crew of the “Rust” film set, she hammered home a key point.
“I told people these are regular weapons we have on set,” Gutierrez-Reed said in a recorded interview with police. “Don’t stand in front of them. Don’t point them at anybody. If it’s pointing in that direction, don’t stand in front of it.”
A few days later, on Oct. 21, director of photography Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza stood in front of actor Alec Baldwin as he pointed a .45 Colt revolver at them and asked if he should cock the hammer. Gutierrez-Reed was not present. Baldwin fired the revolver, striking Hutchins in the chest, killing her. The same bullet wounded Souza in the right shoulder.
Jae C. Hong via Associated Press
In the six months since, one question has lingered: How did a live round enter the gun in Baldwin’s hand? A trove of police interview recordings, several hours of body- and dash-camera videos, and hundreds of pages of incident reports and crime scene photos released last month don’t offer a complete answer.
The files, released over the objections of the Hutchins family, have since quietly been taken offline. Neither the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office nor the Hutchins’ family attorney would say why.
But the evidence, along with a pile of lawsuits filed over the shooting, highlights key safety lapses and lackadaisical gun handling that played a key role in making that live round a fatal mistake.
The armorer did not appear to check her ammunition supply thoroughly. The production crew chose to give Baldwin a real gun to plan a camera shot instead of the non-firing plastic or rubber imitations often used for rehearsals. And they let Baldwin point a gun directly at two people…