The family of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins blasted the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office for releasing graphic video depicting Hutchins’s final moments following her shooting.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office should remove the footage it released earlier this week of Hutchins “dying on the church floor,” the family’s attorney wrote in a letter to the department. Hutchins died on the movie set last October after a live round was fired from a gun being used as a prop.
“The first time Mr. Hutchins saw the disturbing and unsettling video footage of his dying wife lying on the church floor was on Radar Online, an internet website,” the letter said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The potential consequences are disturbing given how information is misused on social media. We fear, for example, that this shocking footage of Andros’ mother dying may be material used by bullies to emotionally abuse him in the future.”
On Monday, the sheriff’s office released the video as part of a trove of documents that shed light on how events unfolded on the day of the shooting. The footage in question showed first responders approaching Hutchins after she was shot with a prop gun held by Alec Baldwin last October. The department released the information in response to a public records request, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said.
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Hutchins’s father was given less than a day to review the material before it was released, his lawyer, Brian Panish, argued in the letter. This was “a wholly inadequate amount of time” because of the “sheer volume of material,” Panish added. New Mexico law gives victims’ families the right to evaluate material such as the trove released by the sheriff’s office before it is released to the public.
“Your office trampled on the constitutional rights of the Hutchins family. … The damage your office has done is irreparable,” Panish argued, per CNN. “Taking down the video will end your office’s complicity in causing further harm.”
In addition to the video, the sheriff’s office also failed to redact Hutchins’s personal information from some of the documents, the letter claimed.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
The document dump included interviews with Baldwin, armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, and others. One clip showed the moment on set before the shooting took place.
Other footage showed Baldwin expressing frustration with being a “public person” and telling police officers, “No, I’m not all right. I’m worried about her,” as he scrambled to figure out what happened, Rolling Stone reported.
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Baldwin has insisted he did not pull the trigger and instead released the hammer. The incident killed Hutchins, and director Joel Souza was injured. It also triggered a law enforcement investigation.
