‘Rust’ armorer given 18 months in prison for gun death
“Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced in a New Mexico court on Monday to an 18-month prison term for her role in the fatal 2021 on-set shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer handed Gutierrez-Reed, 26, the maximum sentence allowable under state law for involuntary manslaughter, agreeing with prosecutors who called her actions on the movie set “extremely reckless.”
“You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” Marlowe Sommer said. “But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive. A husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother.”
The judge said she handed down the maximum sentence partly because the armorer showed a lack of remorse.
“In your allocution you said you were sorry but not … sorry for what you did,” Marlowe Sommer said. “It was your attorney that had to tell the court that you were remorseful.
“The word remorse: a deep regret coming from a sense of guilt for past wrongs. That’s not you.”
A Santa Fe jury found Gutierrez-Reed guilty on March 6 of involuntary manslaughter but acquitted her of tampering with evidence. Prosecutors argued for the maximum sentence because of what they called a “complete and total failure to accept responsibility for her actions.”
Her defense team had requested she receive probation, noting her “relative youth” and “complete lack of prior criminal history.”
During the hearing, Gutierrez-Reed told the judge her “heart aches for the Hutchins family and friends and colleagues,” and claimed to have done her job the best she knew how “despite not having proper time, resources and staffing.”
“Today I humbly ask you to consider probation,” she said.
Her plea came after Hutchins’ friends and family members made statements to the court. Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, submitted a video statement recorded in Kyiv, Ukraine.
“Time does not heal, it gets worse and worse.” she said in Ukrainian, adding that no one connected to her daughter’s death has expressed any remorse to her.
Gutierrez-Reed was the first person to face trial and be convicted in the case in which a prop gun held by Alec Baldwin, the film’s star and executive producer, fired live ammunition, killing Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.
Prosecutors said Hutchins, a cinematographer on the set, died because of Gutierrez-Reed’s “extreme recklessness” while working as the movie’s armorer, who failed to properly maintain firearms safety.
Baldwin is expected to stand trial in July on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He has entered a not-guilty plea in the case.