A court in the First Judicial District of Santa Fe, in New Mexico, United States, found Hannah Gutiérrez Reed, a gunsmith during the filming of the film Rust, guilty of involuntary manslaughter in which director of photography Halyna Hutchins accidentally died in 2021.
The person also responsible for the security protocol, who was acquitted of another charge of tampering with evidence, faces a sentence of up to 18 months in prison and received a preventive detention order after the verdict reached by the jury after two weeks of testimony.
Gutiérrez-Reed – the first person to be tried in this case – was considered by the Prosecutor’s Office as the “main culprit” of Hutchins’ death on October 21, 2021 in a shooting in which actor Alec Baldwin, whose judicial process will begin on July 9.
The gunsmith was the one who loaded the prop gun that Baldwin would later use during the recording and from which the bullet that killed Hutchins came out. Rust director Joel Souza was also injured in this incident.
This Wednesday, the jury largely agreed this Wednesday that Gutiérrez-Reed acted negligently by not properly verifying that the ammunition from the .45 caliber revolver used in the filming of this western was not real, which is why the death of the director of photography was a “foreseeable consequence” of his way of proceeding.
For her part, special prosecutor Kari Morrissey determined in her final argument that the gunsmith’s actions constituted a “staggering breach” of the security protocol when filming scenes with weapons established in the film industry.
Gutiérrez-Reed’s legal defense argued throughout the process that the reduction in security expenses to make this film, for which Baldwin also served as producer, caused her to have an excessive workload and was unable to focus on the tasks purely related to weapons and ammunition.
The gunsmith was also accused in the months prior to this trial of consuming cocaine during the filming of Rust and of having manipulated evidence by trying to hide the drugs through a member of her team on the day of the police investigations on the set. However, these accusations could not be proven and the additional charge against her was dismissed this Wednesday.
The trial against the gunsmith included Souza as witnesses; first assistant director Dave Halls, who avoided jail time by accepting a plea deal; producer Gabrielle Pickle; as well as veteran gunsmith Thell Reed (Hannah’s stepfather) and representatives of the company that supplied the cartridges for filming.
In January, the prosecutor in charge of investigating the case offered the gunsmith “favorable treatment” if she provided useful information for the case, Variety reported.
