Ship has sailed. Gutierrez Reed admits she loaded the live round into Alec's gun. She is being specifically accused of this in her indictment. No one thinks she didn't load the live round. Her lawyer admits it even. But her lawyer's defense is that someone sabotaged the box of blanks with a live round.
The 'Rust' investigation still has yet to answer one of the key questions: Where did the live round come from?
variety.com
"Rust" prosecutors are trying to prevent "Rust" armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed from discussing set safety violations.
theblast.com
Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is the only person still facing charges in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after prosecutors in April dismissed a charge against actor Alec Baldwin based on new evidence. Investigators have not been able to establish the source of the live...
news.yahoo.com
‘Rust’ armorer thought she loaded the gun with dummy rounds, lawyer says
Even though they were the same brand, the live rounds looked slightly different from the dummies. The dummies had a gold-colored primer, while the primer on the live rounds was silver. A dummy round would also rattle when shaken — a BB is placed inside — and a live round would not.
When she loaded Baldwin’s gun, Gutierrez Reed said she pulled four bullets without primers from her pocket.
She pulled two others from a box. She said she checked all of them to make sure they were dummies.
But
one of the rounds was live. It had a
silver primer.
“
That didn’t stick out to you when you loaded that gun?” Hancock asked. “The rest of them were not the same color?”
“
No,” Gutierrez Reed said.
Gutierrez Reed acknowledged that she had only been working as an armorer for a few months, and had no formal training. There is
no official certification process for film armorers.
____________________________________________________________________________________
The “Rust” armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, loaded the gun with what she thought were dummy rounds before Alec Baldwin used it on set.
“There was a box of dummy rounds and the box is labeled dummy. Hannah did take from that box which she by all accounts should have been able to rely on, that contains only dummy rounds,” said Gutierrez Reed’s lawyer Jason Bowles.
“
She loaded rounds from that box into the handgun only to later find out – and she had no idea – she inspected the rounds,
that there was a live round. Now we don’t know, however, whether that live round came from that box.
We’re assuming it did. We’re assuming somebody put the live round in that box, which if you think about that, the person who put the live round in the box of dummy rounds had to have the purpose of sabotaging this set. There’s no other reason you would do that.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________
The court documents allege that “Ms. Gutierrez was unable to distinguish between the two and inserted a live round in the prop gun being used by Alec Baldwin’s character.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Live ammunition is strictly prohibited from being present on movie sets.
The prop supplier for “Rust” said the movie’s armorer told him that before the production
she bought the same type of ammunition as the live round that killed the cinematographer during filming in 2021, according to sheriff’s office records.
In text messages released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office (SFCSO) in response to a Reuters public records request, Seth Kenney, owner of prop supplier PDQ Arm & Prop, told SFCSO Detective Alexandria Hancock that Gutierrez-Reed told him in a telephone conversation after Aug. 3, 2021, that
she had bought live .45 long Colt ammunition to shoot in her own gun.
