Rust gunsmith Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is seen handing over the gun used by Alec Baldwin to accidentally kill cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, telling the officers and then the crew how “scared” she was, new reveals videos played at his trial.
Both Reed and Baldwin are charged with involuntary manslaughter in Hutchins’ death.
She is accused of violating gun safety procedures by handing Baldwin the gun loaded with a live bullet.
“That’s the gun,” Reed said, as another crew member put an arm around her.
Moments later, he sobbed as he spoke to Assistant Principal Dave Halls.
“I’m very scared,” she said.
Prosecutors painted a picture of a “disorganized” and “chaotic” Reed who mixed live bullets with blank dummies on set and used cocaine the night before the shooting.
Her attorneys, in response, told the jury that she had become a scapegoat for Baldwin’s carelessness and that he should never have pointed the gun in the direction of the victim.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 25, entered a New Mexico courtroom to face trial in the 2021 death of a cinematographer shot dead by Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal.
Prosecutors attempted to portray Gutierrez as negligent and disorganized. They showed the image above to the jury on Thursday.
Baldwin was rehearsing a scene for Rust, his western film, when he accidentally shot Hutchins.
He maintains that he thought the gun was loaded with blanks and that he had been assured it was safe, but he says he never even pulled the trigger.
Investigators later found five more live bullets on the set.
Gutierrez-Reed sat in court wearing a gray jacket and white blouse and appeared impassive as District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer read the charges to the jury. Opening statements were delayed Thursday due to a juror’s tardiness.
“We believe that it was the defendant’s negligent acts and failures that led to both the acts that contributed to Ms. Hutchins’ death and the introduction of live bullets onto the set,” prosecutor Jason Lewis said in the statement. opening of the state.
Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers have previously claimed that real bullets arrived on set from an Albuquerque-based supplier of simulated bullets.
One of the photographs of the prosecution’s evidence is seen above. Authorities found six rounds of ammunition on the film set in locations including a box, a gun belt and a bandolier worn by Baldwin.
Alec Baldwin said he had accidentally killed Hutchins and denies pulling the trigger. The jury was shown raw footage of the filming process of Baldwin practicing drawing a gun while he sat in a church pew.
On Thursday they blamed Baldwin, saying the actor “violated basic gun safety rules” when he rushed to finish filming and did not undergo the training Gutierrez had requested.
Defense attorney Jason Bowles said, “This scene did not require him to pull out that gun.” Instead, for some reason, Mr. Baldwin pulled it out and it ends up pointing directly at Miss Hutchins and Mr. Souza.
According to Bowles, Baldwin “controlled the set” as he was the lead actor and one of the producers. By pointing a gun at another person, Baldwin “violated some of the most basic gun safety rules you can ever learn,” Bowles said.
Prosecutor Lewis, for the state, said it was a “pretty chaotic” day when the shooting occurred, as the night before a group of camera operators who had “some concerns about safety issues on set sent an email to the production team saying they were going to resign.’
Baldwin, lead actor and co-producer of the Western film Rust, was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins (pictured) during a rehearsal outside Santa Fe in October 2021 when the gun went off, killing her. .
The next day, the producers decided to “go ahead with filming anyway and use less camera equipment”, while trying to “improvise and make do with what they had”.
“During lunchtime, Ms. Gutierrez took the gun from Mr. Baldwin and took it to the safe, the safe that was loaded on a prop cart,” the prosecutor told the jury.
‘Once lunch was over, the production decided they wanted to continue working inside the church. They weren’t filming anything at that time. They were doing blocking, which in film terms is what you do before you get to rehearsal, a very rough rehearsal where the lighting director and the camera operator are trying to get things together so they can get to rehearsal.
Gutierrez-Reed had a real bullet mixed with simulated bullets on the set, prosecutors told jurors at his manslaughter trial Thursday.
Lewis said several witnesses and “one in particular” will say that “to block Baldwin he could have been using a stick, a rubber band gun, anything that would allow him to imitate a gun.”
During the morning, Gutierrez had only put five bullets in the gun Baldwin was using, but by the afternoon shooting he put a sixth bullet in there, Lewis said. He took it to the church and handed it to first assistant principal Dave Halls.
The pair did a “sloppy and incomplete safety check of the gun, the fake bullets were not removed or made a noise,” which would have told them what type of bullets were in the gun.
Lewis added: “Instead he opened the gun and partially rotated the cylinder to show Mr Halls some of the bullets.” They were not removed from the weapon and were not all checked.
‘After the incident occurred and when Ms. Gutierrez was being interviewed, she said that when she took the gun out of the safe she did not double check the ammunition. When she put the sixth bullet in she also did not check the bullets at that time.
‘Witnesses will testify that when the defendant took the gun out of the safe, what she should have done was open it and check each and every bullet. Then when she took him to the church she should have done a second full ammo check with Mr Halls. This double redundancy is what helps prevent the type of incident that happened to Miss Huchins from occurring.