Mary Carmack-Altwies raced across the desert, chasing some peace and quiet.
She had won her campaign to become Santa Fe’s district attorney the year before, and her first 10 months in office were intense and all-consuming. In her previous life as a public defender and later working in private practice, she always internalized her cases. She felt that empathy made her a good attorney, but it was depleting. “I’ve spent basically my entire career working the worst of the worst cases. And so I feel it a lot,” she says.
In October, her prosecution had successfully sent a man to prison for his role in the child abuse death of a 13-year-old boy. It was a gruesome, emotional case, and Carmack-Altwies needed to decompress. So she scheduled some vacation time, and on the afternoon of October 21 started a solo trip to Taos, New Mexico, a small town known for its historic Pueblo dwellings, art galleries, and majestic views of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. “I was going to just spend the night up there and have a nice, relaxing evening off,” she says. Her wife and kids would join her the next day for her birthday weekend, but first she needed some alone time. “There’s a spot in between Santa Fe and Taos for 30 to 45 minutes where you lose cell service entirely. I’m driving along, and all of a sudden I come back into cell service. And my phone just started dinging, I was getting text messages, and it was just like, ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.”
The district attorney stopped on the shoulder of the road. “The first text was, ‘There’s been a potential homicide on a movie set.’ I started scrolling through, and it was people from my office saying, ‘Alec Baldwin has shot two people.’ Truly, I was like, ‘What…? This cannot be right.’ ”
The basic details of what happened on the set of Rust are well known: A gun held by Baldwin during a scene rehearsal on the Bonanza Creek Ranch went off, firing an actual bullet through cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’s upper body and into writer-director Joel Souza’s shoulder. Souza was wounded but survived. Hutchins did not. Witnesses in sheriff’s documents describe her bleeding on the floor of the church set, panicked and baffled. The accounts of her suffering are excruciating.
Despite all we now know, crucial questions persist. Chief among them are: How did this happen, and who is actually responsible? The answers won’t be clear-cut. This is a case in which Baldwin, the person holding the gun, may not be directly to blame for Hutchins’s death. Still, even if he had never touched the weapon, he is one of the many producers on a film now under suspicion for recklessness and disregard.
As D.A., Carmack-Altwies must determine whether the errors involved rise to the level of criminality. Her work began on the side of that road in New Mexico with a flurry of text replies and calls. “I turned around and came back,” she says. “I assigned one of my chief deputies to basically embed with the sheriff’s department to help with any warrants they needed, any legal questions. And then I spoke to the major who was initially in charge, going back and forth on some different investigatory tools that they could use. We were basically all hands on deck.” Carmack-Altwies’s first priority as a prosecutor was to ensure that any evidence the sheriff’s office uncovered remained admissible in court. “I’m sure we drove them crazy, because it was four lawyers reviewing a search warrant, and each one of us had ‘Oh, you need to add this’ and ‘Oh, I wouldn’t put this in.’ ”
Carmack-Altwies will never meet Hutchins, but they had much in common. They were both 42, and both were embarking on new, higher-level challenges in their work. Both were married; both were mothers. “Halyna had a son that is my son’s age, and just thinking about my son, and that little boy being without a mom, was really upsetting,” says the district attorney. “So I definitely hugged him too much that weekend, and then I came into work on Monday, and we started talking about strategy and what we needed to do to make sure that this case was treated with the utmost professionalism and respect that it deserved—that all homicide victims deserve.”
Hutchins’s union, Local Cinematographers Guild 600, has compiled tributes from friends and colleagues, who remember her as someone who loved to joke and dance but was also a relentless fighter for her work and an ever-replenishing source of energy. (Even the cinematographer’s website biography has a droll, self-effacing touch: “Originally from Ukraine, Halyna grew up on a Soviet military base in the Arctic Circle surrounded by reindeer and nuclear submarines.”) The day after her death, Hutchins’s husband, Matt, posted a photo of her with their son, hiking along a creek. “Halyna inspired us all with her passion and vision, and her legacy is too meaningful to encapsulate in words,” he wrote. “Our loss is enormous….”
Hutchins studied journalism at Kyiv National University and began her film career working on documentaries in Europe. She then devoted her focus to cinematography, graduating from the American Film Institute in 2015, and made splashes at Cannes in 2017 with the sultry thriller Snowbound and at SXSW in 2019 with the fright-fest Darlin’. American Cinematographer magazine named Hutchins one of its “rising stars” in 2019, and she was fulfilling that promise. Rust was supposed to be the next step in her life, not the end of it.
In late February, the D.A.’s office expects to receive a forensics report from the FBI’s crime lab that they hope will reveal critical details about the live round of ammunition that killed Hutchins, including—possibly—who physically handled it, placing the deadly object in an environment where it never should have been. Santa Fe sheriff Adan Mendoza said at a press conference in October that about 500 cartridges had been recovered from the set. “That is a mix of blanks, dummy rounds, and what we are suspecting are live rounds,” he said. Dummies are inert props that only look like bullets, loosely filled with tiny BBs so they rattle like maracas. Blanks are brass casings loaded with explosive powder to create a bang and smoke but have no projectile to launch. Live rounds, by contrast, are lethal and have no place in make-believe. “They shouldn’t have been there,” Mendoza told reporters.
While the district attorney hasn’t yet filed charges and won’t know for several more months if she will, Carmack-Altwies already sees that Hutchins’s death was caused not by a single action but by numerous failures and mistakes. The cinematographer, mother, and wife was killed by an event cascade—each incident contributing to the moment that claimed her life. Virtually no one involved is willing to admit to any culpability, especially as the threat of prosecution looms.
Baldwin has said he feels grief over what happened, but not guilt. Assistant director Dave Halls, whose job involves enforcing safety and, according to the sheriff’s investigation, announced that the weapon in question was a “cold gun,” also doesn’t believe he is responsible, according to his attorney. Representatives of Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the novice armorer who prepped the weapon, insist she did her best on a poorly run production.
Only one person publicly regrets his actions. And he wasn’t even on the set.
1: THE HIRING OF THE ARMORER
Neal W. Zoromski saw the warning signs. It’s why the longtime Hollywood prop master did not accept the lead position on Rust—one of several people who reportedly turned it down—even though he loved the script and thought it might be a level up for him that would lead to even more opportunities. “I thought it would challenge me. I never mastered a Western,” says Zoromski, whose 30-year list of credits includes long runs on the shows Criminal Minds and Scandal.
Rust’s unit production manager, Row Walters, first emailed Zoromski about the job on September 20. Zoromski’s enthusiasm for the project grew as he read Souza’s screenplay to assess what it would require in terms of props and weaponry. He described being transfixed by the story of Baldwin’s character, an outlaw named Harlan Rust who is trying to save the life of his young grandson, who—in a tragically ironic twist—shot and killed someone by accident.
But Zoromski’s confidence in the project began to wane. First the production lowballed him, he says, but he was willing to accept a lesser fee because he believed in the project. Then he realized they were rushing things. On September 23, Walters emailed him again. “We’re still very much in need of a prop master asap. Give me a shout back.” The next day, she informed him of the schedule: He would have to be prepped and ready in Santa Fe by October 5. And they hadn’t even begun formalizing a contract.
“These folks started talking to me roughly 10 days before they were going to begin shooting,” Zoromski says. “And that’s a disservice, not only to the department and what the department is responsible for, but it’s a disservice to the film and a disservice to the actors that are working on the film.”
He still wanted to make it work. “I was really pretty much ready to sign the deal in spite of all the warts,” he says. Then he learned he would have two prop assistants but no separate armorer to focus exclusively on the film’s array of firearms. “We’d really like one of the assistants to be the armorer that can push up on the gunfights and heavy armorer days,” Walters emailed him the next day. (She did not respond to requests for comment.)
“This was the deal breaker, when they wanted to compress the responsibilities of these two positions,” Zoromski says. “This would definitely create a dangerous situation with safety being minimized.” He cited his own armorer credentials as the industry standard. “I have to maintain an entertainment firearms permit, and I’ve maintained that for about 10 years,” he says. “I also maintain a federal firearms license, which puts your fingerprints with the FBI and with Interpol. You can’t imagine yourself an armorer if you have a bunch of skeet shooting trophies on your shelf.” As lead prop master, he would have insisted on overseeing a full-time armorer with that level of experience and dedication. Since he wouldn’t be getting it, he turned down the job. That position, as well as the separate armorer/assistant job, both eventually went to relative newcomers.
Zoromski doesn’t feel like he was spared from being part of a catastrophe. Instead, he’s overcome by grief because he thinks he could have prevented it.
The newbie who took the armorer job was Hannah Gutierrez Reed, daughter of Thell Reed, a legendary Old West armorer and gunslinging adviser for movies such as Tombstone, L.A. Confidential, and Django Unchained. She told the Voices of the West podcast in September that due to her father’s storied career, she’d been around firearms her whole life and occasionally worked for him as a production assistant. But when she was hired on Rust, the 24-year-old had only one previous credit, the as-yet-unreleased Nicolas Cage Western The Old Way. “It was also my first time being head armorer,” she said on the podcast. “I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready.”
Zoromski was working on a Super Bowl commercial with LeBron James when he heard the news of the shooting. “I think the sound mixer had a radio on or something. And I felt sick to my stomach,” he says. He went to the bathroom and threw up.
2: THE INTRODUCTION OF THE BULLET
How did the bullet end up in the gun? That’s the source of significant rumor and innuendo. It’s also the subject of a new lawsuit between the armorer and an Albuquerque props supplier.
Immediately after the shooting, reports suggested members of the crew were putting real bullets into the prop guns and shooting at bottles and cans during downtime. Carmack-Altwies says investigators are exploring that possibility to rule it out: “I have not heard anything yet that that actually occurred.”
She also dismisses the notion, proposed by attorneys for Gutierrez Reed, that disgruntled crew members may have deliberately mixed live rounds with dummies. Rust did have labor problems, with some camera operators walking off the set the morning before the shooting because they were, in part, unhappy with the long workdays and wanted housing accommodations nearer to the remote set. But would an angry crew member really try to get revenge in such a potentially deadly way? “The notion that there’s sabotage—I mean, there is not one iota of evidence at this point,” Carmack-Altwies says.
But somehow a real bullet made its way to that set. Investigators have both the casing and the slug recovered from Souza’s shoulder. Carmack-Altwies hopes the upcoming FBI lab report on those materials will help resolve the chain of custody. But on November 30, a new search warrant affidavit filed by the sheriff’s department indicated that detectives were looking into the Albuquerque office of PDQ Arm & Prop and its proprietor Seth Kenney, who provided materials for the film’s weapons.
Sarah Zachry—also 24 and a relative newcomer with just two credits—ended up taking the lead prop master job Zoromski and others turned down. After the shooting, Zachry rushed back to the weapons cart and examined the box of dummy bullets that she believed assistant prop master Gutierrez Reed used to fill the cylinder of the gun. As Zachry checked the dummies in the box, “she found some of the cartridges would rattle,” according to the sheriff’s search warrant request. In other words, there was no explosive packed inside them, just BBs. “However, others did not rattle. Sarah said this led her to believe some of the other rounds in that box were live ammo.”
But who brought the box? Zachry told investigators she believed “the ammunition for Rust was provided from various sources,” including Kenney, Gutierrez Reed herself, and another individual identified only as “Billy Ray.”
On October 27, while detectives executed a search warrant on the prop truck at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, Kenney was there to provide the code for unlocking a safe, and Detective Alexandria Hancock used this as a chance to question him about what items he provided for the film. “Seth advised the ammo included dummy rounds and blanks,” the November 30 search warrant stated. “He said how the ammunition he provides to the productions are from a manufacture[r] identified as Starline Brass.”
The suspected live round that killed Hutchins had a Starline Brass logo on it, the document added.
But Starline Brass doesn’t sell blanks, dummies, or live rounds. It only sells brass casings and other elements that can be used to assemble those things. On October 29, Hancock reported she “received a phone call from Seth, where he advised he might know where the live rounds came from.” He did not admit to supplying the bullet himself but told her he had experience with Starline and the live round in question was probably “reloaded ammunition”—a handcrafted bullet rather than one premanufactured by another ammo company.
That still didn’t resolve who made the live bullet or who brought it to set.
On November 17, Gutierrez Reed’s father, Thell, directed investigators toward Kenney. He told Hancock that he had previously worked with Kenney in August and September on another movie production. They held a gun-range training session with those actors away from the set to give them a sense of how real guns feel when they are fired. Thell Reed told investigators that Kenney asked him to bring an extra canister of live ammunition so they wouldn’t run out. “Thell stated…this ammunition was not factory-made rounds,” the search warrant document declares. In other words, they were homemade. And Starline Brass supplies the materials for such things. After the training session, Thell Reed said Kenney kept that extra canister.
“Those rounds, we believe, were the ones that ended up on the set,” says Jason Bowles, an attorney for Gutierrez Reed. So the Reeds are conceding that the bullet that killed Hutchins may once have belonged to them but contend it was brought to the Rust production by Kenney. In early January, Gutierrez Reed filed a lawsuit against Kenney formalizing these allegations. Thell Reed’s claim is being investigated, but there is skepticism that it may be an effort to generate doubt. (Carmack-Altwies declined to say what may have been found in either party’s possession.) In her lawsuit, Gutierrez Reed even claims Kenney warned her that “dragging me into this” would backfire. “If anything, the D.A. may perceive this as an unapologetic scapegoat tactic and lower the boom even harder,” he wrote on November 20, according to screenshots included in the filing.
A request for comment sent to a number listed under Kenney’s name received a hostile response, but after this story was published, Kenney reached out to Vanity Fair to say that was an old number and the comments were not him. In a subsequent interview with Vanity Fair, Kenney says the can of ammunition in question was nowhere near the Rust set. The bullets that Thell Reed gave him were brought to Texas for the actor training on that other film, Kenney says, and remained in Texas on the set of that project until after the Hutchins shooting incident.
He adds that the makeup of those bullets physically differ from the fatal one. “The rounds I got from Thell don’t match. I gave the sheriff’s department a sample of those rounds,” Kenney says, emphasizing: “Prior to the search warrant they executed.” He says he remains confident that he and his business will be exonerated when the investigation is complete. “All my dummy rounds, that I provided to the show, were very unique. They were chemically aged and patinaed to look like they have been around a very long time,” he says. “My dummy rounds check out.”
Gutierrez Reed’s lawsuit against Kenney suggests he urged her to shift the blame to Rust’s assistant director. “Go and talk to the police, tell them everything, answer every question down to what you had for breakfast,” he wrote in November, according to another screenshot included in the claim. “You’re young, certainly not green or inexperienced with period weapons, but did you get rolled over by the set system and the AD w/ 30+ years of experience? I think you did, and you’re too proud to say that.”
3: LOADING THE BULLET
As the prop assistant and armorer, Gutierrez Reed was responsible for prepping the vintage Colt .45 that Baldwin held during that fatal rehearsal. There is little to no dispute about that. As a result she has been vilified more than any other individual involved, but her attorney insists she was a conscientious worker overwhelmed by the demands and chaos of a poorly run set.
Though Gutierrez Reed told the Voices of the West podcast that her one previous job had gone “smoothly,” the key grip on The Old Way, Stu Brumbaugh, remembers the production differently. “I didn’t get the sense that she was careless. I got the sense that she was inexperienced, and there’s a big difference,” he says. Brumbaugh felt Gutierrez Reed lacked training in set protocols and recalled a moment with one of the horse wranglers. “They were having a discussion about a certain horse possibly being spooked at the sound of the gun going off,” he says. “She was testing…. So she kind of fired at the ground near the horse.” However the horse reacted, the crew freaked. “Nobody likes a gun going off behind them when it’s unannounced,” he said.
Amid the uproar, he remembered Gutierrez Reed acknowledging the mistake. “I think she kind of recognized like, Oh yeah. Oh, oh shit, yeah.” But then it happened again. Days later, Brumbaugh says she was talking with someone about the differences between blanks: full rounds, half rounds, and quarter rounds, which refers to the amount of explosive powder in each. The more powder, the bigger the bang. To demonstrate, she fired at the ground again, he said. “Then I was pissed. At that point I was like, Okay, this is the second time in like three days that this has happened,” Brumbaugh says. “And when she did that, unfortunately for her, Nic Cage was walking by and he grabbed his ear, and he kind of chewed her out. He kind of bit into her because he was pretty pissed off.”
Experience costs money, and producers like to cut costs, which Brumbaugh believes is causing safety issues throughout the industry. Young crew workers don’t always have the backbone to resist when filmmakers demand too much: “So you have a 20-something who’s being hounded by the A.D. to hurry, to rush, to go, go, go, go, go, go, go. ‘We need the shot! The actor’s on set!’ You’re trying to do a million different things. And when you’re young, you’re not efficient.”
That’s exactly what Gutierrez Reed’s attorney believes happened to her that day on Rust, although he disagrees with the assessment that she was inexperienced. In the late morning on October 21, Gutierrez Reed and the other prop workers began prepping the guns, including Baldwin’s Colt .45. The actor needed it for a rehearsal set to begin before lunch. “Approximately 11 a.m., Hannah has loaded five dummies. They were clearly dummies,” says Bowles, Gutierrez Reed’s lawyer, adding that his client had shaken every one of them to check. “The sixth round would not go in, so she left it with five. She handed that over to Baldwin. They did a brief thing, and then they broke for lunch.”
At that point, Bowles says the gun went back to Gutierrez Reed, who locked it in the prop truck’s safe. After lunch, around 1 p.m., she went to retrieve it—and fix that empty sixth slot. Dummies are necessary because the ends of the revolver’s cylinder are exposed, and viewers would be able to tell if the chambers were empty. “So she cleans the cylinder and she pulls another round, a different round, out of that box and puts that round into the chamber,” Bowles says. At the same time, he says she was being urgently summoned to set over her radio.
Did she shake that last round to make sure it was a dummy? “Yes,” her attorney says. “She thought it had rattled, but at the same time, people are screaming in her earpiece, ‘Get the gun, get the gun.’ But she thought it had rattled.”
At some point, a real bullet made its way into that gun. So was that last round the one that killed Halyna Hutchins? “We don’t know for sure, because that gun was out of her eyesight and custody for 15 minutes,” Bowles says, referring to when Gutierrez Reed handed the gun over for the rehearsal moments later and left the church. “But if indeed nobody else had access to it, then yes, that would’ve been the round, the live round.”
In many media reports, Gutierrez Reed has been depicted as carrying multiple guns simultaneously in a dangerous manner, sometimes wedged under her arms. Bowles says this is a misrepresentation. “It wasn’t that she was inexperienced. It was that production had her doing two different jobs,” Bowles says. “She fought for a week and a half trying to get a cart. And people are bitching about her carrying the guns under her arms? Well, she didn’t have a cart to put them on.”
He shared screenshots in which she was actually praised by director Souza for her diligence. “Excellent work today,” Souza texted her on October 8. “Always quick with the weapons and quick with the ammo and very safe.”
Days before Hutchins’s death, Gutierrez Reed was reprimanded by a manager for spending too much time on weaponry. “We hired you as both Armor and Key Assistant Props,” wrote line producer Gabrielle Pickle on October 14. “However, it has been brought to my attention that you are focusing far more on Armor and not supporting props as needed.”
Gutierrez Reed was receiving mixed messages. In the same exchange, Pickle described two incidents in which a shotgun was found unattended and requested that a check-in procedure be put in place immediately that would keep firearms locked away when not in use. Gutierrez Reed wrote back that a check-in system would slow the production and said she had repeatedly warned actors in safety meetings not to abandon weapons. “An actor will set them somewhere and forget them and that’s just a thing that happens same as every other prop,” Gutierrez Reed told the line producer. “Even days when we aren’t doing gunfire I’m still doing the Armorer job checking the guns in for every single scene and showing they’re empty, so when guns are left by an actor we at least know that they are a clear gun.”
Pickle pressed her again about committing to the other prop work. “Well Gabby, I think I have been taking my props side seriously,” Gutierrez Reed wrote back.
In another email exchange on October 14 with a crew member named “T.C.,” Gutierrez Reed addressed the safety procedures surrounding the use of blanks by referencing another famous film-set tragedy. She invoked The Crow from 1993, when a broken fragment of a dummy round was launched out of the barrel of a prop gun by a blank cartridge, killing the film’s 28-year-old star. “As Armorer, it’s my job to be present when all actors fire,” Gutierrez Reed wrote. “Misfires haven’t happened on any of my sets. I always check barrels, rip Brandon lee.”
4: LAX ON-SET SAFETY INSPECTION
Matters of life and death on set are never just one person’s responsibility. After Lee’s death on The Crow, investigators chose not to prosecute any of the crew, saying the negligence that caused the accident was not willful or wanton. But after that, checking for loose fragments in prop guns and verifying for everyone within the vicinity whether a gun was full of dummies (“cold”) or loaded with blanks (“hot”) became far more rigorous.
Armorers typically perform such public inspections, but assistant directors do too, or they supervise. Often they remove and inspect each fake bullet, rattling the dummies and ensuring no possible projectiles are in front of the blanks. But nothing that painstaking happened on the set of Rust.
After cleaning the cylinder to make the sixth round fit, Gutierrez Reed hurried the Colt .45 to the weathered wooden church set, her attorney says, and presented it to assistant director Dave Halls: “She then spins the cylinder for him, showing him it’s got six rounds in it, and hands it to him. He said, ‘Okay.’ She then leaves the church. She did not take them out and shake them again for Halls,” Bowles adds. “But she had done that before lunch.”
Of course, that was before she added the final round.
It was a punishing day on set. Work began before dawn, around 6:30 a.m., which was common for the production. Hutchins had posted a photo to her Instagram two weeks before her death showing a sunrise that glowed like wildfire. “One of the best parts of shooting a western are mornings like this!” she wrote.
But on the morning of the 21st, the dispute over working conditions and hotel accommodations had reached a breaking point, and some of the camera operators walked off the set, leaving the production scrambling and short-staffed. Souza later told sheriff’s investigators that they’d only scraped together enough replacement workers to run one camera instead of several at once, which slowed everything down. Midway through the production, the movie was in crisis. During the lunch break, assistant director Halls got into a dispute with script supervisor Mamie Mitchell (who later angrily recounted their fight in her 911 call to report the shooting).
Then came the postlunch rehearsal. Baldwin was working with Souza and Hutchins on a shot that would see his outlaw character rise from a church pew and exchange fire with some armed men hunting for him and his grandson. A report from the sheriff’s office said Baldwin was practicing a “cross draw”—reaching across his body with one hand to pull the firearm from a holster.
Here, Halls’s and Gutierrez Reed’s accounts diverge. Her attorney says she handed the weapon to Halls and left the church. In her lawsuit against PDQ, she states that Baldwin wasn’t even in the church. However, Halls’s attorney, Lisa Torraco, says Gutierrez Reed handed the weapon directly to the actor. The sheriff’s report says crew members saw Halls hand the gun to the actor. “As the Assistant Director (Dave Halls) handed the prop-gun to Actor Alec Baldwin, (Dave Halls) yelled, ‘Cold Gun,’ indicating the prop gun did not have any live rounds,” stated an October 22 search warrant affidavit.
Halls’s attorney contends that the investigator’s document is riddled with inaccuracies. “I think some of the witnesses got confused when they said that they thought that Halls handed it to Baldwin, because at one point Baldwin needs to readjust his holster, and he hands the firearm to Mr. Halls, who’s standing three feet next to him on set.” Then Baldwin took the gun back, she says.
Did Halls call out “cold gun,” as witnesses said? His attorney says Halls isn’t sure. “He doesn’t have a memory of that.”
After the shooting, some former colleagues of Halls came forward to complain to the media about his work on past films. Maggie Goll, a prop maker who worked with him on the Hulu series Into the Dark in 2019, told CNN in a statement that he had to be reminded to make safety announcements. The Associated Press, citing an anonymous producer, said Halls was fired from the drama Freedom’s Path that same year after an accidental gun discharge hurt the ears of a sound technician. (Neither Goll nor producers for Freedom’s Path responded to requests for comment from V.F. Halls’s attorney declined to comment on those claims.)
Torraco does admit that, on the set of Rust, Gutierrez Reed opened the gun and showed it to Halls upon her arrival in the church. “He did examine the gun, but he didn’t even hold it when he was examining it,” she says. He remembers the chambers only being partially full, with three or maybe four rounds, she added. Halls did not remove the rounds or shake them. “He was told that that’s the armorer’s responsibility,” says Torraco. “He wasn’t distracted and he wasn’t under duress and he didn’t overlook anything. He did his job the way he was told and taught to do his job. He relied on other people to do their job because they’re professionals as well.”
Baldwin would later say roughly the same thing about himself.
5: THE GUN GOES OFF
The scene in question was never filmed. Sheriff Mendoza says no cameras were rolling when the shooting occurred. Baldwin was only working with Hutchins to figure out camera angles when the unthinkable occurred. Here is the sequence, from page 87 of Rust’s 101-page screenplay, that was being rehearsed: Alec Baldwin’s wounded gunslinger has taken refuge in a weather-beaten prairie chapel, blood pooling beneath his pew. Two men enter from the back of the church, urging him to surrender.
Rust [is] still, the script reads. Hand moving almost unnoticeably. Slips a Colt from its holster.
“Ain’t no iteration you walk outta this church less’n you stand up slow and toss them guns….” one of the men calls out.
Rust’s Colt COCKED quietly now…
Gunfire from afar causes the men to whirl, giving Rust the distraction he needs to strike.
Colts EXPLODING. SHREDDING the pew in front of him, the script continues. Rust hits the floor. Rolling under pews. Out the other side. Staggering up. Colts BARKING.… Rust moving backwards. Unrelenting FIRE. Makes it out a door…
Should Baldwin himself have checked the gun? George Clooney is among the actors who say he should have. “Every single time I’m handed a gun on the set, every time they hand me a gun, I look at it, I open it, I show it to the person I’m pointing it to, I show it to the crew,” Clooney said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “Every single take.”
In a December interview with ABC News, Baldwin reacted testily to the notion that he bore some responsibility. “If your protocol is you checking the gun every time, well, good for you. Good for you,” he said. “My protocol was to trust the person that had the job, and it worked up until this point.” He said he felt haunted by what happened but did not feel guilty: “No. No. I might have killed myself if I thought I was responsible, and I don’t say that lightly.”
Baldwin, who declined to be interviewed for this story, also dismissed the suggestion that he might bear some responsibility for the way the set operated, though he, his production company, and his manager were among Rust’s producers, and he was credited with cocreating the story with Souza. “I’m not a producer that hires the crew,” he said.
Finally, there was this bombshell claim in the interview: “I didn’t pull the trigger.”
That caught the attention of D.A. Carmack-Altwies. “I didn’t know too much about guns, certainly not about 1850s-era revolvers. So when I first heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ ” she says.
Baldwin says that he merely pulled back the hammer on the gun. FBI analysis of the weapon will determine functionality, as well as whether mechanical failures might have caused it to go off. But in the meantime, Carmack-Altwies and her investigative team did an unofficial test of their own. “One of the investigators in my office happens to have a very old type revolver, and so he brought it, at my request, so that we could look at it and see if that was at all possible,” she says.
They cleared a room in the office, and two investigators inspected the gun—the one who had supplied it, then a second officer who verified that it was empty. “Then they visually showed me,” says Carmack-Altwies. “You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it. So you pull it back partway, it doesn’t lock, and then if you let it go, the firing pin can hit the primer of the bullet.”
And that can cause a live round of ammunition to fire.
What the district attorney does with that information will become clearer as the year progresses. Once all the lab data is complete, once all the claims and counterclaims are investigated, she will reach a decision about whether the failures that killed Halyna Hutchins amount to criminal wrongdoing. Among the possible charges are involuntary manslaughter and negligent use of a deadly weapon. To bring either to a jury, she would need proof that those involved knew, or should have known, they were being unsafe.
Baldwin and crew workers who directly handled the gun are already embroiled in civil litigation and workplace investigations, which is likely to last for years to come. An OSHA probe began immediately and could result in monetary penalties and perhaps even new safety regulations, and at least two crew workers have sued the producers, their companies, and even other crew members for injury and emotional distress. Lawyers for Hutchins’s family did not initially respond to a request for comment, but on February 15, they filed their own lawsuit against Baldwin, claiming he behaved recklessly. The lawsuit, seeking damages for wrongful death, also alleges the consortium of producers and associated crew members failed in their duties to maintain safety.
Aaron Dyer, the attorney representing Baldwin and the producers, released a statement in response—which pointed blame back at Gutierrez Reed and Halls: “Any claim that Alec was reckless is entirely false. He, Halyna, and the rest of the crew relied on the statement by the two professionals responsible for checking the gun that it was a ‘cold gun’—meaning there is no possibility of a discharge, blank or otherwise.… Actors should be able to rely on armorers and prop department professionals, as well as assistant directors, rather than deciding on their own when a gun is safe to use.” (Gutierrez Reed’s and Hall’s attorneys declined to comment.)
But could any of the producers, including Baldwin, or writer-director Souza, himself one of the victims, be charged with a crime for how the set was managed? Carmack-Altwies says their actions would have to be deliberate. That’s why investigators sought, and finally gained, access to Baldwin’s cell phone, to see what communication about practices on set were shared between the Rust leadership before the shooting. “Certainly there’s a potential for a producer or producers to be charged if we have direct evidence that they willfully disregarded the safety of others,” Carmack-Altwies says. “That’s why I keep saying everything’s on the table.”
Nothing will bring Hutchins back. Nothing will heal the loss. But understanding specifically what happened here—cutting through the obfuscation and finger-pointing—could prevent a similar loss from happening again.
Before Carmack-Altwies brings any charges, she will have one other important meeting. She will sit down with Hutchins’s family. The district attorney has not done that yet—on purpose. “If they ask me a question, I can’t answer it at this point,” she says. Once she decides how to move forward, she will solicit their thoughts. “In New Mexico, there’s a Victim’s Rights Act that’s part of our constitution, and they have an absolute right to be at all court hearings, to give their opinions on whether a plea should be offered, and then to speak at sentencing.”
That will lead the D.A. back to Hutchins herself: Who was she? What did she love? What did she mean to those who knew and loved her back?
“I have to know who I’m fighting for,” the district attorney says. “I know I’m fighting for the constituents in my district, but also this specific victim. At this point, I can’t let all of that emotion cloud the judgment that goes into viewing the facts, then deciding if someone should be held criminally liable. We have to go through that procedure, and then I can start to try to get to know the victim in order to convey to a jury what this world has lost.”
This article has been updated.
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