Alec Baldwin: Rust armourer says actor partly responsible for Halyna Hutchins death

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The armourer for Rust is suing the film’s gun and ammunition supplier following the fatal on-site shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

Hutchins died after a gun held by actor and producer Alec Baldwin was accidentally fired during rehearsals at the Bonanza Creek Ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 21 October 2021.

Baldwin, who has not been charged in relation to Hutchins’s death, has said he didn’t know the gun he was holding contained a live round when it went off.

Armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed is now suing PDQ Arm and Prop LLC, claiming the supplier gave her a cache of dummy ammunition with live rounds mixed in.

She also claimed that Baldwin is partly responsible for Hutchins’s death, after the actor allegedly ignored a request to attend a crossbow safety training session. However, the actor is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

In a complaint filed at a New Mexico district court on Wednesday (12 January), Gutierrez Reed accuses PDQ and its founder Seth Kenney of violation of trade practices, false and deceptive product labels, and false and material misrepresentations.

The lawsuit read: “The introduction of live rounds onto the set, which no one anticipated, combined with the rushed and chaotic atmosphere, created a perfect storm for a safety incident.”

Kenney has not yet commented on the lawsuit, but he has said previously that he was sure his company did not send any live rounds to the movie set.

The Independent has contacted representatives for Baldwin for comment.

Investigators are still trying to find where the live round came from, having searched the Albuquerque premises of PDQ Arm & Prop in December.

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The new lawsuit seeks unspecified damages at a jury trial, and also accuses Kenney of inserting himself in the investigations and attempting to implicate Ms Gutierrez Reed.

Authorities recovered hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the Rust movie set — a mix of blanks, dummy rounds and what appeared to be live rounds.

They issued a search warrant for Baldwin's phone, seeking text messages, images, videos, calls or any other information related to the movie.

In December, during a tell-all interview with George Stephanopoulos, Baldwin claimed he never pulled the trigger.

The 63-year-old actor said: “I would never point a gun at anyone and point a trigger at them, never.”

He explained that he had cocked the hammer as he had been instructed to and the gun had simply gone off in his hand, fatally wounding Hutchins in the abdomen.

The film’s director Joel Souza was also injured in the shooting that triggered a renewed discussion over gun safety protocols on movie sets.