“A police officer hired by the productions should be present at all cinema or TV shooting locations that use firearms, dummy or otherwise, to monitor their safety.Alec Baldwin wrote on Twitter on November 8. The actor and author of the fatal shot on Halyna Hutchins is therefore in favor of the presence of an additional reinforcement, in addition to a gunsmith, to prevent any incident. That of the shooting of Rust has just made an astonishing confession …
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was the film’s armourer Rust, produced by (and with) Alec Baldwin. She was responsible for the guns on the set of the western in Albuquerque (New Mexico), where cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed, killed by accidental shooting, on October 22. Questioned by the police, Hannah confessed to them her negligence in checking the revolver operated by Alec Baldwin, just before the tragedy.
The gunsmith “didn’t really check” …
According to the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office, Hanna Gutierrez-Reed told officers she loaded five dummy cartridges into the gun just before lunch break. On resumption, she had extracted the weapon from the safe where she had placed it and added a sixth cartridge, then handed the gun to another employee of the set. Shortly after, she said she heard a detonation coming from the set.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed told investigators she did “not really checked muchthe gun because it had been locked away during lunch. She had previously claimed to ignore the presence of any live ammunition on set.
The current investigation seeks in particular to determine how a real ammunition could have been introduced on the set of the film. Halyna Hutchins fell victim to it. The latter was fatally injured by a shot from Alec Baldwin, who was working on a scene with a weapon handed over by the production and which he believed to be harmless.
Police seized more than 500 ammunition on the set, presented as a mixture of blank cartridges, dummy cartridges and some ammunition suspected to be real. One of the suppliers of the ammunition used on the set of Rust, Seth Kenney, indicated that he potentially sold the film crew hand-assembled ammunition with a logo that matches the logo on the lethal cartridge.
Hannah Guttierez-Reed’s father, Thell Reed, also a famous film gunsmith, said he had provided Seth Kenney with “homemade” live ammunition for the preparations for another film on which they had previously collaborated. Seth Kenney would never have returned them to him.
The police investigation is continuing and, if no arrests have taken place, criminal prosecution is not excluded if responsibility is established. To date, two complaints naming Alec Baldwin have been filed. The person concerned tries to find a semblance of normal life and enjoys the support of his family.