Armorer sentenced in film set shooting
•Amovie weapons supervisor was sentenced to 18 months in prison in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film Rust, during a hearing Monday.
Movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-reed was convicted in March of involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and has been held for more than a month at a county jail on the outskirts of Santa Fe. Prosecutors blamed Gutierrez-reed for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set of Rust, where it was expressly prohibited, and for failing to follow basic gun safety protocols.
Gutierrez-reed, 26, was unsuccessful in her plea for a lesser sentencing, telling the judge she was not the monster that people have made her out to be and that she had tried to do her best on the set despite not having “proper time, resources and staffing.”
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer for Rust, was pointing a gun at Hutchins during a rehearsal on a movie set outside Santa Fe in October 2021 when the revolver went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.
Baldwin has pleaded not guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He is scheduled for trial in July.
New Mexico Judge Mary Marlowe Summer, who is overseeing proceedings against Baldwin, said anything less than the maximum sentence would not be appropriate given that Gutierrez-reed’s recklessness amounted to a serious violent offence.
“You were the armorer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone,” the judge told Gutierrez-reed. “You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother.”
Gutierrez-reed teared up as Hutchins’ agent, Craig Mizrahi, spoke about the cinematographer’s creativity and described her as a rising star in Hollywood. He said it was a chain of events that led to Hutchins’ death and that had the armorer been doing her job, that chain would have been broken.
Friends and family recalled Hutchins as courageous, tenacious and compassionate, a “bright beam of light” who could have gone on to accomplish great things in the film industry.
“I really feel that this was due to negligence,” Steven Metz, a close friend, testified. “This case needs to set a precedent for all the other actors and cinematographers and every one on set whose lives are at risk when we have negligence in the hands of an armorer, a supposed armorer.”
Los Angeles-based lawyer Gloria Allred read a statement by Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, who said her life had been split in two and that time didn’t heal, rather it only prolonged her pain and suffering.