On Wednesday, an American court convicted the person in charge of weapons on the set of the movie “Rust,” which in 2021 witnessed the killing of a female photographer by an accidental bullet fired by actor Alec Baldwin, of manslaughter.
Prosecutors accused the weapons operator on the set of the low-budget film, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, with repeated negligence. She faces a prison sentence of up to 18 months. The verdict will not be pronounced until next month.
Filming of the Western film “Rust” on a farm in the US state of New Mexico witnessed a tragedy on October 21, 2021, when Baldwin used a weapon from which live ammunition was fired, killing photographer Halina Hutchins (42 years old) and wounding director Joel Souza.
Over the course of two weeks, the trial tried to determine how a live ammunition, one of many collected by investigators, ended up in a gun on the set, in violation of safety rules common throughout the film industry.
During the hearings, jury members were shown photographs showing Baldwin using weapons in a dangerous manner, and pointing them at other members of the team, without the intervention of the weapons officer.
“This is not a case in which a mistake was made by accidentally putting a live bullet into this weapon, but rather a case of continuing safety failures that killed one person and nearly killed another,” U.S. Attorney Carrie Morrissey said during her closing arguments Wednesday.
“Many failures”
The Public Prosecutor found that Hannah Gutierrez Reed showed negligence on the morning of the incident, as she was absent while Baldwin was preparing to film the scene, and left the approximately 20 weapons that the production team was using unattended.
She confirmed that she “left the weapon in the church” where the tragedy occurred, “violating all the standards that regulate the work of weapons officials on filming sites,” adding, “As a large number of witnesses reported, she was leaving the weapons unattended the entire time. October 21 was not witnessed.” “October is anything unusual.”
Morrissey, the weapons officer, was accused of bringing live ammunition to the filming location and not conducting the necessary oversight to ensure that the ammunition inserted into the weapon was safe, as empty bullets produce a sound that can be easily identified when the weapon is shaken.
She continued: “If you didn’t check that the ammunition was not live, every time an actor carried a weapon it was like a game of Russian roulette.”
Scapegoat
The prosecution accused Hannah Gutierrez Reed of concealing an amount of cocaine that she had taken outside her work hours after the tragic incident. On this point, the jury found her not guilty.
One of her attorneys, Jason Bowles, said Gutierrez-Reed served as a scapegoat for a production team that neglected safety for financial reasons, making her the “appropriate culprit.”
The young woman had no way of knowing that live ammunition had been brought onto the set, and she thought the production team had only brought empty bullets, according to the lawyer.
The lawyer added: “The responsibility lies with the production (team), as is the case in any organization. We start from the top.”
He denounced the producers’ rush to report it the day after the tragic incident.
“What the producers want is to continue working to finish the film and make money,” he said.
Baldwin, the film’s star and one of its producers, faces manslaughter charges. His trial is supposed to begin in July.
Filming on “Rust” officially resumed in March in Montana, with Halena Hutchins’ widower, Matthew, serving as executive producer.
At the end of 2022, he abandoned the civil proceedings he filed against Baldwin following an agreement whose value was not disclosed. At the time, Matthew Hutchins attributed his wife’s death to a “terrible accident.”
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