The armourer who put a live round into the gun that Alec Baldwin was using on the set of the film Rust in 2021 when it went off, killing the cinematographer, has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
The conviction of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed marks the first time a jury has weighed in at trial on the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
The top charge carries a penalty of up to 18 months in prison.
After the verdict was read, prosecutors asked that Gutierrez-Reed be taken into custody and the judge, Mary Marlowe Sommer, agreed. A court officer led Gutierrez-Reed out of the courtroom, not in handcuffs.
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Baldwin is also facing a charge of involuntary manslaughter and is scheduled to stand trial in July. He has argued that he was not responsible, since he was told that there were no live rounds in the gun and there were not supposed to be any on the set.
Gutierrez-Reed’s trial, which lasted two weeks at the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico, focused on the fact that Gutierrez-Reed was supposed to load Baldwin’s revolver that day with dummy rounds, inert cartridges that are meant to resemble real bullets on camera but which cannot be fired.
But one round turned out to be live. And when the gun went off as Baldwin worked with Hutchins to set up camera angles, it fired a bullet that killed her, wounded the movie’s director and left the movie industry wondering how it could have happened on a film set where live ammunition was supposed to be banned.
The prosecutors argued that Gutierrez-Reed had exhibited a pattern of negligence on the Rust set, calling crew members to the stand who criticised her conduct, testifying that she had left her prop cart, where she kept weapons and ammunition, in disarray and had sometimes failed to take weapons away from actors immediately after a scene finished filming. And prosecutors accused Gutierrez-Reed of bringing the live rounds on set, showing the jury a photograph of her with what they said were the live rounds early in the filming, before a key shipment from the film’s main ammunition supplier.
Gutierrez-Reed has denied being the source of the live ammunition, and her legal team has defended her as being a young armourer whose authority on set was undercut by producers who sought to minimise costs, rushing the crew and overburdening Gutierrez-Reed with extra prop duties that took her away from her weapons responsibilities.
After the shooting, police found six live rounds on the set, including the one that had been fired.
“This was a game of Russian roulette every time an actor had a gun with dummies,” Kari Morrissey, the lead prosecutor, said during closing arguments on Wednesday.
The 12-person jury delivered its verdict after 2½ hours of deliberations.
The jury found Gutierrez-Reed not guilty of a charge of evidence tampering related to an account from another Rust crew member who said that on the day of the fatal shooting, Gutierrez-Reed had passed her a bag of cocaine and asked if the crew member could hold on to it for her.
The defence had argued that because the crew member threw out the bag immediately, her testimony on the contents was not reliable. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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