Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who served as the armorer on Rust, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison as a result of the fatal shooting that took place on that set. Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematography Halyna Hutchins, who died after a prop gun discharged, firing a live bullet into her while she was preparing for a shot. Director Joel Souza was also injured by the shot, which came from a revolver held by actor and executive producer Alec Baldwin. Baldwin, who is also facing charges, claims he never pulled the trigger.
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Initial charges against Baldwin were dismissed, but prosecutors returned to the case later. Much of Baldwin’s defense is expected to rest on Gutierrez-Reed’s culpability in the shooting.
“You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” Judge Mary Marlow Sommer told Gutierrez-Reed, handing down the 18-month sentence, which is the maximum allowed by the law. “But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother.”
As the armorer on set, Gutierrez-Reed was responsible for the care and handling of the firearms used in the production of Rust. It has never been established how the live rounds managed to get onto the film’s set, but early reports claimed that members of the crew were taking the prop guns out for recreational shooting after hours. Both Gutierrez-Reed and Baldwin have been criticized for not detecting the live rounds before the gun ever went off.
In the weeks leading up to the fatal accident, there had reportedly been other safety issues surrounding guns on the set, with two different guns misfiring a total of three times. According to reports, Baldwin’s stunt double accidentally fired two blank rounds from what he had been told was a “cold” or unloaded gun (Baldwin also says he was told the gun was cold before he took it). The third misfire, which also involved a blank rather than a live round, was by the movie’s prop master, Sarah Zachary, who claimed she shot herself in the foot with a blank while re-loading a revolver.
During the course of the trial, prosecutors depicted Gutierrez-Reed as a habitual drug user, who partied all night and came into work hung over. They also claim that she was in possession of cocaine and that, shortly after the shooting, she gave it to a friend to hide it from law enforcement. When Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys lobbied for a light sentence last week, prosecution fired back, telling the judge that they did not believe she had genuine remorse for her actions, and that other charges she faced suggested she was a danger to the community.
Gutierrez-Reed was found not guilty of evidence tampering — a charge that related to the alleged cocaine possession — back in March. Had she been found guilty of evidence tampering, her sentence could have been as much as three years.
In the time since the shooting, Gutierrez-Reed has left Hollywood behind and acted as a social media manager. Gutierrez-Reed is the stepdaughter of Thell Reed, a longtime armorer and weapons consultant on many Hollywood productions. Gutierrez-Reed’s defense said numerous times that she has been helping to care for her father, who is struggling with cancer. It is not immediately evident whether this is Reed, or Gutierrez-Reed’s biological father, since both the family and news reports interchangeably refer to Reed as her father and stepfather without much distinction.
Gutierrez-Reed also has some outstanding charges from an unrelated incident, where she is accused of smuggling a gun past security at a bar.
