Alec Baldwin “played make-believe with a real gun and violated the cardinal rules of firearm safety,” the prosecution alleged during opening statements in his Santa Fe, New Mexico, trial for involuntary manslaughter in the fatal Rust set shooting. He is charged in the on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin has pleaded not guilty.
In her opening statement, prosecutor Erlinda Johnson painted Baldwin, who starred in and produced the film, as cavalier with firearms and suggested that the cast and crew faced constraints, ramping up the risk of someone getting injured on set. “While it was a movie set, it was a real-life workplace for many people, but you will hear this workplace was on a tight budget, and you will learn that some of the people who were hired to work at this workplace were very inexperienced and one of those was the armorer, a young woman named Hannah-Gutierrez Reed,” Johnson said, saying that this was “obvious.”
Johnson claimed that before Baldwin arrived to set, “He requested to be assigned the biggest gun available.” Baldwin’s behavior suggested a lack of focus. “Defendant had some people filming him while he’s running around shooting this gun,” Johnson alleged. In the days before this fateful incident, Baldwin repeatedly handled the gun, even firing it, and the weapon worked “perfectly fine.”
“Each time the defendant handled this firearm, he did not do a safety check with that inexperienced armorer, and you’ll hear that the reason he didn’t do a safety check was because he didn’t want to offend her,” Johnson said.
Baldwin stands accused of accidentally killing Hutchins on October 21, 2021, while rehearsing a scene; he is accused of pointing the gun at her and pulling the trigger. Prosecutors have contended that armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed provided the gun to Baldwin, and that it hadn’t been adequately checked to ensure that it didn’t contain live ammunition. Director Joel Souza was also hurt in the shooting. Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the incident on March 6, 2024. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison on April 15. David Halls — who pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon and was given a six-month suspended sentence — testified at Gutierrez-Reed’s trial and claimed that she had given Baldwin the gun. Baldwin has insisted that Halls gave him the weapon.
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