Sheriff: Movie set showed ‘complacency’ with weapons
Investigators said Wednesday there was “some complacency” in how weapons were handled on the movie set where Alec Baldwin shot and killed a cinematographer and wounded another person, but it’s too soon to determine whether charges will be filed.
Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza also noted that 500 rounds of ammunition — a mix of blanks, dummy rounds and live rounds — were found while searching the set of the Western “Rust.”
“Obviously I think the industry has had a record recently of being safe. I think there was some complacency on this set, and I think there are some safety issues that need to be addressed by the industry and possibly by the state of New Mexico,” Mendoza told a news conference nearly a week after the shooting happened during a rehearsal.
Investigators believe Baldwin fired a single live round with a long Colt .45 revolver that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza.
Detectives have recovered a lead projectile they believe the actor fired last week. Testing is being done to confirm whether the projectile taken from Souza’s shoulder was fired from the same gun used by Baldwin.
Two other guns were seized, including a single-action revolver that may have been modified and a plastic gun that was described as a revolver, officials said.
Souza, who was standing behind Hutchins, told investigators there should never be live rounds present near the scene.
“We suspect there were other live rounds, but that’s up to the testing. But right now, we’re going to determine how those got there, because they shouldn’t have been,” Mendoza said.
After Bryan Kang’s son was born in July, the occupational therapist and his wife, a teacher, started looking for child care in the Los Angeles area. The couple called eight day care centers: Some didn’t have spots for months; others stopped taking their calls and some never answered at all.
So with no viable options, Kang scrambled to find a new job that would allow him to work remotely.
“I told my manager, ‘Hey, by the end of the month, I have to transition out,’ ” Kang said. “They were very supportive and very under- standing because they’re all mothers. But now there’s one less body to see patients.”
Kang said he’s fortunate he found a job teaching online classes, but the unexpected career pivot forced him to take an 11% pay cut.
The truth is, even if he could find a day care spot for his now 3-month-old son, the $2,500 monthly cost of infant care is so high that taking a lower-paying job so he can work from home and care for the baby is the most financially sensible thing to do.
The child care business has for years operated in a broken, paradoxical mar- ket: low wages for workers and high costs for consumers. Yet the critical service somehow managed to limp along.
Now, the pandemic response has made clear what many experts had long warned: The absence of reli- able and affordable child care limits which jobs people can accept, makes it harder to climb the corporate ladder and ultimately restricts the ability of the broader economy to grow.
“Early learning is no lon- ger seen as just a women’s issue or a children’s issue. It’s really seen as an economic issue. It’s about workforce participation,” said Mario Cardona, policy chief for Child Care Aware of America. “It’s about employers who don’t have to worry about whether they’ll be able to rely upon employees.”
Child Care Aware estimates 9% of licensed child care programs have permanently closed since the pandemic began, based on its tally of nearly 16,000 shuttered cen- ters and in-home day cares in 37 states between Decem- ber 2019 and March 2021.
Now, each teacher resignation, coronavirus expo- sure and day care closure reveals an industry on the brink, with wide-reaching implications for an entire economy’s workforce.
The national crisis has forced many people — mostly women — to leave their jobs, reshaping the child care crisis as not just a problem for parents of young chil- dren, but also anyone who depends on them. It has con- tributed to a labor shortage, which in turn has hurt businesses and made it more dif- ficult for customers to access goods and services.
“The decisions we make about the availability of child care today will shape the U.S. macroeconomy for decades to come by influencing who returns to work, what types of jobs parents take and the career path they are able to follow,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan.
President Joe Biden has pledged an unprecedented burst of federal spending in hopes of fixing the child care market. At a recent town hall in Baltimore, he assured parents they would “not have to pay more than 7% of your income for child care.” Federal money would go directly to care centers to cover costs in excess of the 7% cap. This means the median U.S. family earning $86,372 would pay $6,046 annually for child care.
Biden’s plan also includes universal pre-kindergarten, which could further reduce child care expenses for fam- ilies. The expanded monthly payments from the child tax credit approved in Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package would be extended for another year. The president also proposed increasing the size of a tax credit for the cost of child care, all of
which should help improve access for families.
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to score the costs as the measures are still being negotiated ahead of Biden’s departure Thursday for the G-20 conference in Rome. But Don- ald Schneider, a former chief economist for the House Ways and Means Committee who now works for the consultancy Cornerstone Macro, estimates the child care and pre-kindergarten support would cost $465 billion over 10 years. The one-year price-tag of the expanded child tax credit would be around $120 bil- lion. The credit would cost an additional $940 billion if renewed for nine more years.
It remains to be seen what survives in the brutal negotiations in Congress for Biden’s broad family services agenda, but the pandemic is proving to be a make-or- break catalyst for the future of the child care industry.
At Forever Young Daycare in the Seattle suburb of Mountlake Terrace, Amy McCoy is burning out fast.
She’s spent half of this year trying to hire a new assistant for her in-home child care, but until then, the former public school teacher works 50 hours a week caring for children herself, and more doing the cooking, cleaning and administrative work needed to run her business.
“At what point is my day care more important than my own family?” McCoy asked.
One of McCoy’s assistants, who worked there for five years, quit the $19-an-hour job in April for a $35-an-hour job nannying.