LOS ANGELES — In February, the family of Sarah Jones scattered her ashes in the Appalachian Mountains to mark the eight years since she was killed on a Georgia movie set.
The popular camera assistant was hit by a train during filming on a historic trestle, which the railway operator hadn’t approved. For her father Richard, the sadness of losing his daughter in a preventable accident was deepened by another more recent tragedy: the killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the Western “Rust,” outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“The first thing I thought [was] we had failed our mission. We’ve got to do a better job,” Jones said. That weekend he called for the formation of a film and TV industry coalition to address a lack of consequences and enforcement of safety protocols.