Courtesy Santa Fe County Sheriff
Video from the set of "Rust" released on Monday shows actor and producer Alec Baldwin drawing a firearm during a rehearsal.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Monday tried in fits and starts to release a massive set of files from its investigation into mayhem on the Rust set. Reporters across the nation, and likely the globe, now have a deeper cache of material about the October shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who died on location of the Western film Rust in Santa Fe County after a gun went off in the hands of Hollywood megastar Alec Baldwin, a producer and actor on the production.
The document-and-video dump offers some never-before-seen moments from before and after the shooting and provides insight into the probe aimed at whether anyone should be criminally charged in the incident, which left Hutchins, 42, dead, and director Joel Souza injured.
But none of the newly released files answers any long-lingering questions.
Courtesy Santa Fe County Sheriff
The upshot: Sheriff Adan Mendoza says he still can’t complete his criminal investigation without outstanding ballistics and fingerprint analyses from the FBI, a finding on cause and manner of death from the state Office of the Medical Investigator and a review of Baldwin’s cell phone data by New York prosecutors.
Shortly after Mendoza’s announcement, First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies, issued a release of her own, saying the sheriff’s department has turned over a portion of its investigation. Once her office receives the entire analysis and conducts a thorough review of all the evidence, “a criminal charging decision will be made,” Carmack-Altwies’ statement reads.
“Once these investigative components are provided to the sheriff’s office we will be able to complete the investigation to forward it to the Santa Fe District Attorney for review,” Mendoza says in his release.
Monday’s flurry of activity in the case comes on the heels of the New Mexico Environmental Department’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau fining the production company $136,793—the maximum penalty allowed by the state. The environment department says the company was aware that firearms safety procedures were not being followed during the filming of Rust.
The environment department investigated alleged administrative violations—and a handful of lawsuits are focusing on alleged civil lawbreaking—as opposed to Mendoza’s probe, which involves potential crimes.
The sheriff’s office originally sent out the files around noon on Monday, but had to suspend its Dropbox account shortly afterward due to excessive traffic spurred by news organizations attempting to access them. The case has for half a year drawn heavy, international scrutiny in the news media.
The sheriff’s department eventually sorted out the tech issue, and the records revealed for the first time what Baldwin told law enforcement after the shooting— and what he said in private conversations with coworkers.
Baldwin definitively states that he was holding the revolver when it discharged.
“We’ve done this for two weeks and we did it the right way every day,” Baldwin tells investigators in a video of his interview with Sheriff’s Det. Alexandra Hancock.
Baldwin assumed the firearm handed to him on the set was “a cold gun,” not meant to produce a flash or fire. He said he turned and cocked the gun and it went off, striking Hutchins in the armpit before hitting Souza in the shoulder.
“I’ve never seen a theatrical flash round where the material went through someone’s armpit, came out their body and hit somebody else in the shoulder,” he tells investigators. “I’m wondering if your department is prepared to go find out what comes out of his shoulder, surgically. Is that a live round? It doesn’t make any sense otherwise.”
Courtesy Santa Fe County Sheriff
Rust Movie Productions, LLC is facing multiple civil suits, including a claim by Hutchins’ family in New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court, accusing Baldwin of breaching industry protocols. The film’s script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, filed a suit against Baldwin and the producers in Los Angeles County Superior Court, saying she suffered pain in her ears because she was standing only a few feet away when the gun went off. Chief lighting technician Serge Svetnoy also alleges the producers are at fault and responsible for his severe emotional distress in a Los Angeles County lawsuit.
In text messages from December between Baldwin and the prop master that were part of the documents provided by the sheriff’s office, Sarah Zachry, Baldwin wrote “they seem to be getting very close to the truth of what happened,” adding that private investigators had been hired and “they may get to the truth before the police do.”
“There is too much riding on this for too many people,” Baldwin wrote to Zachry.
In legal filings by Baldwin, he claims that armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed told him to cock the revolver. Attorneys for Gutierrez-Reed have pushed back, though, saying she was never called into the church where the scene was taking place and that Baldwin knew he wasn’t supposed to point a firearm at crew members.
According to text messages from Zachry, Gutierrez-Reed never helped with props, except for a couple of times when Zachry was off set.
“She’s literally trying to throw producers and me under the bus,” Zachry wrote.
Two short clips provided by investigators and labeled “Set Videos” appear to show Baldwin seated on a church pew as a camera operator experiments with angles. The screen grab at the top of this story shows him practicing a move to take the gun out from under his coat and point it toward the camera.
