Rust shooting: What the jury heard about how live rounds got on a film set

The set of Rust after the fatal shooting. Photo / Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office via The New York Times

Ever since a real, live bullet discharged from the gun that Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of the film Rust in 2021, killing the cinematographer and wounding the director, one question has vexed everyone involved: how did live ammunition end up on a film set, where — all agree — it absolutely should never have been?

The film’s armourer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was found guilty on Wednesday (Thursday NZT) of involuntary manslaughter in the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and faces up to 18 months in prison. (Baldwin is scheduled to stand trial in July on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.) The jury found that Gutierrez-Reed, 26, had behaved negligently by failing to check that all of the rounds she loaded into Baldwin’s revolver were dummies, which are inert rounds that look real but cannot be fired.

The question of where the live ammunition came from in the first place has hung over the case from the start. The original investigation by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office did not reach a conclusion on where the live rounds had come from.

During the trial, prosecutors sought to convince jurors that it was Gutierrez-Reed who was responsible for bringing the rounds onto the set. The defence asserted that Gutierrez-Reed, who did not testify, was not at fault, and tried to focus attention on the movie’s primary weapons and ammunition supplier, Seth Kenney, who took the stand and denied responsibility.

Here is what emerged during the trial about the live ammunition and where it may have come from.

Prosecutors zeroed in on a box of rounds from the set

When investigators arrived at the chaotic scene shortly after the shooting, on October 21, 2021, Gutierrez-Reed showed a lieutenant from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office a cart where she kept guns and ammunition and drew his attention to a box of ammunition where she said she had retrieved the rounds she put in Baldwin’s revolver.

“So here’s the box that I got them out of,” Gutierrez-Reed, visibly shaken, told Lieutenant Tim Benavidez, according to body-camera footage that was shown to the jury.

On the witness stand, Benavidez said that Gutierrez-Reed had shown him a rectangular white box labelled “45 LONG COLT DUMMIES”. Jurors were shown a photograph of the box that was taken in his patrol vehicle.

Rust movie armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, centre, talks with her legal team during her trial in Santa Fe on March 5, 2024. Photo / AP

Investigators found a live round in that box. It was one of six known to be on the film set, which included the one that killed Hutchins; two that were discovered on top of the prop cart; one that was in a gun belt assigned to an actor and one in the gun belt assigned to Baldwin, who was playing a grizzled outlaw in the movie.

In a later police interview that was played for the jury, Gutierrez-Reed said she had supplied two boxes of dummies to the Rust production that had been left over from another production she had worked on. She said she had taken them from a bag, where they had been kept loose, and checked that they were dummies before putting them into boxes.

When Corporal Alexandria Hancock, the lead investigator on the case, asked Gutierrez-Reed during that interview what those boxes looked like, Gutierrez-Reed showed her a photo on her phone.

“Does this look exactly like the box of dummies that Mr Benavidez took from the prop cart on October 21, 2021?” the lead prosecutor on the case, Kari Morrissey, asked Hancock at trial, showing the jury the photo Gutierrez-Reed had displayed.

“Yes, it looks exactly like it,” she replied.

The prosecution said another photo pointed to Gutierrez-Reed as the source of the live rounds

One of the prosecution’s key pieces of evidence was an iPhone photo of Gutierrez-Reed in which she is holding a gun and has a tray of ammunition sitting on her lap. Sarah Zachry, the head of props on Rust, testified that she took the photo on October 10 to ensure they were maintaining continuity on the production with regard to props.

The prosecution argued that at least two rounds visible in the tray on her lap, which have distinctive silver-coloured primers, were live rounds. And they said the fact that the photo was taken on October 10 — two days before the production got more .45-calibre Long Colt dummy rounds from the film’s main supplier, Kenney — suggested that those live rounds had come from Gutierrez-Reed.

In her closing arguments, Morrissey compared the styrofoam bullet tray shown on Gutierrez-Reed’s lap with a photo of the Styrofoam bullet tray that was taken out of the box of ammunition that Benavidez retrieved after the shooting. She argued that both photos showed the same tray and pointed out that one of the rounds — one with a silver primer, which the FBI later determined was a live round — was “in the exact same position” as in the earlier photo.

A styrofoam bullet tray taken out of the box of ammunition that was retrieved after the shooting. Photo / Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office via The New York Times

“Ladies and gentlemen, we call that circumstantial evidence,” she said, after leading the jury through a long series of photographs to make the case. “But that’s a mountain of circumstantial evidence.”

Gutierrez-Reed’s lead lawyer, Jason Bowles, told the jury that “you cannot tell a live round from a dummy by a picture”.

And Bowles said that jurors should not rely on the idea that the rounds found in those ammunition boxes were the same containers they had been brought to set in because “these rounds were loaded in and out of these boxes daily”. He said that “there’s reasonable doubt all over the place”.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict on Wednesday, one of the jurors, Alberto Sanchez, said the jurors had been convinced that Gutierrez-Reed had brought the live rounds to the set. “We think she did,” he said.

The defence tried to focus attention on the film’s supplier

Gutierrez-Reed told investigators that the ammunition from the Rust set came from three sources: Kenney, herself and a supplier named Billy Ray.

Kenney and Zachry both testified that while Ray had supplied the production with some dummy rounds, none were .45-calibre Long Colt rounds, the kind used in Baldwin’s gun.

Lawyers for Gutierrez-Reed sought to focus attention on Kenney, who testified that he supplied a single box of .45-calibre Long Colt dummy rounds to the Rust set.

Weapons and ammunition supplier Seth Kenney on the Rust set. Photo / Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office via The New York Times

When investigators searched Kenney’s office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they recovered .45-calibre live ammunition that he had stored there. He testified that it came from another production before Rust — 1883, a Yellowstone spinoff — where he worked with Thell Reed, a famous Hollywood armourer who is Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather.

Kenney testified that during that production, some cast members had left the set to shoot live ammunition — including some .45-calibre Long Colt rounds — in what he referred to as “cowboy training camp”.

Kenney testified that Reed had supplied the live rounds for 1883 and said that after the training camp, Kenney had taken the remaining live ammunition — including more than 100 .45-calibre rounds — back to New Mexico with him.

Marissa Poppell, the crime scene technician who inventoried evidence from the set, testified that when investigators searched Kenney’s office and storage location, known as PDQ Arm & Prop, they recovered .45-calibre Long Colt live ammunition from a grey bin labelled “LIVE AMMO 1883″, which Kenney stored in the bathroom of his office.

“Did any of them look identical to the live rounds found on set?” Morrissey asked.

“No,” Poppell replied.

Poppell testified that the box of .45-calibre Long Colt dummy rounds that Kenney supplied to the set did not contain any live ammunition.

During his testimony, Kenney asserted that the live rounds could not have come from him because he had checked the dummy rounds, shaking them so that he could hear the rattle of a BB inside, a common way to show a round is inert.

A box of rounds retrieved from the scene of the shooting. Photo / Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office via The New York Times

The defence raised questions about the initial investigation

Lawyers for Gutierrez-Reed have repeatedly highlighted the fact that the police’s search of Kenney’s office did not take place until more than a month after the fatal shooting, leaving open the potential for evidence tampering.

“A delay of a few days could be an issue,” testified Scott Elliott, a private investigator hired to aid the defence. “But a month is — you could do anything in a month.”

Why was some ammunition thrown out after the shooting?

Zachry, the head of props, testified that after the fatal shooting, she unloaded two other guns that had been loaded with what she believed to have been dummies and threw the rounds away in a trash can, and only told police later in the investigation.

Zachry, who signed a cooperation agreement that protects her from prosecution as long as she testifies truthfully, denied that she had been trying to hide evidence.

“In a state of shock and panic,” she testified, “I think it was a reactive decision.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Julia Jacobs

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