Los Angeles (AFP) – The deadly shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin’s budget movie “Rust” was the result of “constant, never-ending safety failures” by the film’s armorer, a US jury heard Wednesday.
Hannah Gutierrez, who was responsible for weapons on the production, is on trial for involuntary manslaughter over the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Hutchins was shot by a live round fired from the Colt .45 that Baldwin was holding in a church on the New Mexico set. Director Joel Souza was wounded by the same bullet.
The two-week trial has focused on how the round — one of a number that investigators found — made its way onto the set, in contravention of strict industry safety rules. The jury has also been shown footage of performers handling guns in a way that witnesses described as dangerous, with Gutierrez failing to intervene, including Baldwin waving his weapon around like a “pointing stick.”
“This is not a case where Hannah Gutierrez made one mistake and that one mistake was accidentally putting a live round into that gun,” prosecutor Kari Morrissey told the jury in her closing argument Wednesday. “This case is about constant, never-ending safety failures that resulted in the death of a human being and nearly killed another.”
Morrissey said on the morning Hutchins was shot, the armorer, who is also known as Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was characteristically haphazard with her supervision of the more than 20 guns the production was using, and was not present as Baldwin and the crew prepared for a scene.
“She left the gun in the church contrary to all the industry standards for armorers on movie sets,” Morrissey said. “As you heard from many witnesses, she would leave guns unattended all the time. There was nothing unusual about October 21,” the day of the fatal shooting.
Gutierrez, Morrissey said, had brought live rounds onto the set, and did not perform basic checks to ensure the dummy rounds she was loading into guns were inert, including shaking them to hear their characteristic rattle.
“Folks, if she’s not checking the dummy ammunition… to make sure that those rounds… are in fact dummy rounds, this was a game of Russian Roulette every time an actor had a gun,” she told the jury.
Defense lawyer Jason Bowles said Gutierrez was a scapegoat for a production that skimped on safety for financial reasons. Gutierrez had no way of knowing there were live rounds on set and was entitled to believe that producers had procured dummies for the movie, he said.
“The buck stops with production, as in any organization. It starts at the top,” he said. He claimed that in the aftermath of the tragedy, producers had circled the wagons and offered up Gutierrez to law enforcement. “The big guys they want to sail off into the sunset and go on about their business to finish the movie. Make the money. They’ve got the convenient fall person sitting right here.”
Gutierrez also faces one charge of tampering with evidence in relation to the alleged disposal of cocaine in the immediate aftermath of the incident. She denies all charges.
Baldwin, who was also a producer on the movie, faces his own charge of involuntary manslaughter over the shooting. His trial is expected in July.
© 2024 AFP
