Armorer in fatal ‘Rust’ shooting sentenced to 18 months

(CN) — At the sentencing hearing for "Rust" armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on Monday in Santa Fe, New Mexico, friends and family of the film's cinematographer Halyna Hutchins spoke of Hutchins' life and her impact on those who knew her best. The live and video statements were frequently emotional, painting a portrait of a vivid, ambitious woman whose life was cut short in an on-set accidental shooting.

Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, spoke in a video recorded in Ukrainian with English subtitles. “The pain of loss does not end,” Solovey explained. “Time does not heal.”

Following the statements presented by the prosecution, Gutierrez-Reed read a short statement pleading for probation rather than prison time. “The jury has me found in part at fault for this godawful tragedy,” she said, “But that doesn't make me a monster. That makes me human.”

On Oct. 21, 2021 during filming of the western film “Rust” at the Bonanza Creek Ranch near Santa Fe, actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing a scene which involved him drawing a revolver and pointing it toward the camera. The gun discharged, a bullet struck Hutchins in the chest and director Joel Souza in the shoulder. Hutchins, 42, was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital, where she died. Souza, 48, was treated at a Santa Fe hospital and released the following day.

Over the course of the two-week criminal trial this past February, prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis argued Gutierrez-Reed was responsible for the circumstances leading to Hutchins’s death. By failing to conduct a safety check on the rounds pulled from a safe on the set and again failing again to do a check when she handed the weapon to assistant director David Halls, who passed the gun to Baldwin for scene practice, "the defendant acted negligently and without due caution,” Lewis said during opening statements. “The decisions she made that day ultimately contributed to Ms. Hutchins’s death.”

Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer Jason Bowles argued the production was rife with safety issues and that others were attempting to wrongly shift blame to his client. “Just because there was a tragedy does not mean that a crime was committed,” Bowles said, arguing Gutierrez-Reed was being made a scapegoat for errors and negligence that were not under her control. 

Following closing arguments on March 6, the jury found Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter after mere hours of deliberation, but acquitted her of tampering with evidence. 

On Friday, prosecutors Morrissey and Lewis submitted a response to Gutierrez-Reed’s request for conditional discharge requesting the maximum 18-month prison sentence. They argued Gutierrez-Reed has showed no remorse and had called the jurors in her trial “retards, idiots, and assholes” in recorded phone calls from the Santa Fe County Jail where she has been held since her conviction, as well as complaining that the jury took only two hours to deliberate before delivering a verdict.

Those jailhouse phone calls were brought up by presiding New Mexico District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer as she handed down the sentence. Sommer summarized the events that led to a live round being loaded into the prop gun, and read a quote from the recorded calls in which Gutierrez-Reed said, “People have accidents and people die, it's a part of life.”

“I did not hear you take accountability,” Judge Sommer pointed directly to Gutierrez-Reed. “In your allocution you said you were sorry but not that you were sorry for what you did. It was your attorney who had to say that you were remorseful.” 

Citing this lack of remorse, Sommer declared "a conditional discharge is not appropriate. The second option, leaving you in the detention center, is giving you a pass you do not deserve. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, a husband would have his wife and a little boy would have his mother.” 

Baldwin was indicted by a grand jury this past January on an involuntary manslaughter charge. An earlier indictment was filed in January 2023, but dropped three months later. The indictment was renewed when evidence emerged that despite the actor’s claim that he pulled the hammer back but didn’t pull the trigger, the gun could not have gone off on its own.

Alec Baldwin’s criminal trial is scheduled to begin July 9.

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