Gun expert guilty of giving Alec Baldwin live bullets before filmmaker shot dead

06 March 2024 , 23:20

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The weapons expert faces 18 months in jail over the deadly mistake (Image: Getty Images)

An on set movie gun expert has been found guilty of handing Hollywood star Alec Baldwin real bullets just moments before Rust filmmaker Halyna Hutchins was shot dead.

The jury contemplated for over two hours before reaching their verdict against movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. She will be staying in custody until she can be sentenced as she faces up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine. As for her additional charge, tampering with evidence, she was found not guilty.

Prosecutors argued that she didn't maintain proper firearm safety multiple times. In fact, they argued that she brought live rounds on set and failed to perform industry-standard safety practices. However, her defense attorney, Jason Bowles, argued that no one knew there were live rounds.

READ MORE: Hilaria Baldwin has long been accused of faking Spanish accent amid Rust court case

Alec Baldwin was yet again indicted

The verdict assigns new blame in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in October 2021 after an assistant director last year pleaded no contest to negligent handling of a firearm.

Alec Baldwin accused of 'wilful disregard for others' safety' before Rust death

Baldwin, the lead actor and a co-producer on the western movie, was indicted by a grand jury in January on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. He was pointing a gun at Hutchins on the movie set outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, when the gun went off, tragically killing Halina and wounding director Joel Souza.

The gun needed to be reconstructed

During the gun expert's trial, her attorney blamed Baldwin for "going off-script" when he pointed the gun at the filmmaker and, therefore, Gutierrez-Reed could not have known it would be fired. He said: "It was not in the script for Mr. Baldwin to point the weapon. She didn't know that Mr. Baldwin was going to do what he did."

Baldwin's previous indictment was dropped after he claimed the gun was defective and that he did not pull the trigger.

Halyna Hutchins died of her devastating injuries after the gun went off (Instagram)

However, the gun was broken, so the prosecutors temporarily dropped it while they investigated it further. Ballistics experts were later able to reconstruct the gun and determined that the trigger would need to have been pulled for it to go off.

The report from experts said: "This fatal incident was the consequence of the hammer being manually retracted to its fully rearward and cocked position followed, at some point, by the pull or rearward depression of the trigger."

Chloe Stewart