During the trial, prosecutors acknowledged that Alec Baldwin, who actually fired the shot that killed Hutchins, had a history of poor gun handling on set. But, they said, that didn’t absolve the armorer’s part in the tragedy.
“Hannah Gutierrez knew that Baldwin was loose. She knew it,” Morrissey told the jury. “She didn’t do anything about it, even though it was her job. It was her job. It is her job to say to an A-list actor, if in fact, that’s what you want to call him, ‘Hey, you can’t behave that way with those firearms.’ That is her job. That is what they pay her for. That is the job that she applied for. That is the job that she accepted.”
The armorer in charge of the prop guns and ammunition on the set of the movie Rust has been sentenced to 18 months in a state prison for the incident in which actor Alec Baldwin shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun in October 2021.
A New Mexico jury had found 25-year-old Hanna Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter back in early March. And on Monday, a judge handed down the maximum sentence to Gutierrez-Reed, citing her lack of remorse as one reason for that penalty.
Gutierrez-Reed 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 had tried to do her best on the set despite not having “proper time, resources and staffing.” Gutierrez-Reed plans to appeal the judgement and sentence, defense attorney Jason Bowles said in an email.
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 at a courthouse in Santa Fe.
The revolver should never have contained live ammunition, according to industry-wide regulations and union guidelines governing the use of firearms on film sets, and the Santa Fe district attorney’s office had said in their initial probable cause statement that evidence indicated the scene Baldwin was rehearsing should not have even required the use of blanks. Inert dummy rounds would have sufficed instead, the statement alleged, and cited expert weapons consultants who noted that a plastic or replica gun should have been used during the rehearsal.
It was Gutierrez-Reed’s responsibility to manage the weapons being used on the “Rust” set, including the gun that discharged and fatally hit Hutchins, the district attorney’s office said. But there are conflicting accounts as to how exactly live ammunition could have ended up in the revolver. The probable cause statement at first alleged that Gutierrez-Reed had loaded the .45 prior to taking a lunch break on Oct. 21, stored it, and retrieved it after lunch before handing it off, without performing the necessary safety checks, to the first assistant director, David Halls.