‘Rust’ film armourer says someone may have put bullet in gun
THE WOMAN in charge of weapons on the movie set where actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins said Wednesday night that she had inspected the gun Baldwin shot but doesn’t know how a live bullet ended up inside.
“Who put those in there and why is the central question,” Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the armourer for the movie Rust, said in a statement issued by one of her lawyers, Jason Bowles of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Hannah kept guns locked up, including throughout lunch on the day in question (October 21), and she instructed her department to watch the cart containing the guns when she was pulled away for her other duties or on a lunch break.”
The statement goes on to say that “Hannah did everything in her power to ensure a safe set. She inspected the rounds that she loaded into the firearms that day. She always inspected the rounds.”
The statement adds that she inspected the rounds before handing the firearm to assistant director David Halls “by spinning the cylinder and showing him all of the rounds and then handing him the firearm”.
“No one could have anticipated or thought that someone would introduce live rounds into this set,” Gutierrez Reed’s statement said.
The statement also noted that “she did firearms training for the actors as well as Baldwin, she fought for more training days, and she regularly emphasised to never point a firearm at a person”.
On October 29, attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez Reed said she doesn’t know where the live rounds found there came from and blamed producers for unsafe working conditions.