Lawyers for the armorer on the set of the film Rust, where actor Alec Baldwin accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, claim a saboteur may have put live rounds in the gun.
Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence, attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, said she loaded the gun with rounds from a box marked “dummy” but that there was ample opportunity for someone to swap real bullets into the box or after the gun was prepped. Bowles said that how the live round got on set and who put it there is “the central question” of the case.
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“We don’t know, however, whether that live round came from that box. We’re assuming it did,” Bowles told Today. “We’re assuming somebody put a live round in that box … The person who put the live round in a box of dummy rounds had to have the purpose of sabotaging this set. There’s no other reason you would do that.”
The lawyers said there was motivation for someone to want to harm the set, as crew members had walked off in protest of poor working conditions the day before. There was also the opportunity to switch the rounds, either in the dummy box or during the two hours the gun sat unattended after it was loaded.
“You can’t rule anybody out at this point,” Bowles said. “We know a couple facts at this point. We know there was a live round in a box of dummy rounds that shouldn’t have been there … we have a time frame of between 11[a.m.] and 1 [p.m.] approximately that day in which the firearms, at times, were unattended. So there was the opportunity to tamper with this scene.”
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They also said that Gutierrez-Reed was working as an assistant props manager, which took her away from her duties as armorer, though she was only paid for her armorer job.
Various crew members have blamed Gutierrez-Reed for the accident that occurred on Oct. 21, including the head electrician. Suspicion has also been cast on assistant director David Halls for allegedly calling out “cold gun” before handing it to Baldwin. There are also allegations of gun safety slips in the days leading up to the shooting.
