The trial of a gun armorer on the New Mexico film set where the actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer while rehearsing a scene for the neo-western Rust in October 2021 is set to start on Wednesday with jury selection.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 25, faces involuntary manslaughter and tampering charges for allegedly loading a fully functioning .45 revolver with dummy rounds and at least one live round – then handing the gun to Baldwin, who was pointing it at Halyna Hutchins when it went off. The bullet also injured the director Joel Souza.
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer of the ill-fated western being filmed in New Mexico, also faces charges of involuntary manslaughter and faces a similar sentence to Gutierrez-Reed if convicted: up to 18 months in prison.
Baldwin’s trial date has not been set; but, like Gutierrez-Reed, he has pleaded not guilty. He claims that he pulled back the hammer of the gun, but did not pull the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed’s trial is certain to be closely watched by Baldwin’s defense lawyers because much of the prosecution evidence set to be presented in her case may also be used at his trial.
Investigators ultimately found six live rounds on the set, including some in a box of supposed dummy ammunition, in a gun belt worn by the actor Jensen Ackles and in the bandolier worn by Baldwin.
The Santa Fe judge Mary Marlowe Sommer recently ruled that jurors would be allowed to hear evidence from text messages that Gutierrez-Reed was drinking alcohol as well as using marijuana and cocaine the night before the fatal shooting occurred.
Sommer said prosecutors had successfully argued that the tampering and involuntary manslaughter charges were connected by the “same conduct or series of acts”.
Prosecutor Kari Morrissey had argued Gutierrez-Reed had brought “live rounds on to a movie set”.
“She failed to discover them for 12 days,” Morrisey said. “She loaded one of them into a gun. It was then manipulated by an actor and very foreseeably someone died.”
Prosecutors also allege that after giving a statement to police, Gutierrez-Reed had handed what appeared to be a bag of cocaine to a state’s witness and said: “Hang on to this for me.”
Gutierrez-Reed’s phone also allegedly shows she was smoking cannabis at her hotel during the production. “I might go smoke in the jacuzzi soon,” she allegedly said in a text to another crew member. Another text message read: “Headed down to get high out back.”
“The relevant ones are the one where she’s smoking weed with ammo in the hotel room, and that she’s smoking in the jacuzzi,” Sommer said at the hearing, according to Rolling Stone.
Prosecutors claimed that action connects Gutierrez-Reed to the weapons-tampering charge. They plan to use the messages to argue that she may have been hungover when the fatal shooting occurred, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The state also plans to use cellphone data and Gutierrez-Reed’s police interview to show how her alleged drug and alcohol use contributed to her apparently negligent conduct on the set.
Gutierrez-Reed’s defense team has said no drug or sobriety tests were conducted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Her attorneys claim she is merely a “scapegoat” for the accident, and they have accused prosecutors of assassinating her character with “rumors and improper comments on her guilt”.
Last year, Rust’s first assistant director, David Halls, was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation after pleading guilty to unsafe handling of a firearm when he handed Baldwin the revolver.
Baldwin was charged in January with involuntary manslaughter after having an earlier set of charges dropped “with prejudice”. Prosecutors allege Baldwin’s negligence – or “total disregard or indifference for safety” – caused Hutchins’s death.
The actor said after the fatal shooting that “there are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time, but nothing like this – this is a one-in-a-trillion episode.”
Baldwin initially claimed the gun had gone off after he pulled back the hammer but not the trigger, a claim that is subject to competing theories about the gun and its condition that now look set to be tested at trial.
After the first set of charges were dropped, prosecutors went to a grand jury to get an indictment instead of refiling their criminal complaint. Defense attorneys have pointed to that as a sign that the prosecutors’ case is shaky.
“I think it’s a weak case that they botched from the beginning, and Baldwin has unlimited resources,” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told the Guardian in January.
Rahmani also said Baldwin possibly would not serve much, if any, prison time in the event of a conviction.
But legal experts have said the indictment gives prosecutors an opportunity to win a conviction based on Baldwin’s obligations as a co-producer on the film.
