The lawyers for “Rust” gunsmith Hannah Gutierrez Reed have suggested that someone deliberately smuggled live ammunition into a box of dummy bullets before camerawoman Halyna Hutchins was shot.
While appearing on several morning news broadcasts Wednesday, attorney Jason Bowles voiced the possibility that someone was trying to “sabotage” production by smuggling live rounds into the ammunition package Gutierrez Reed used to load the prop gun fired by star Alec Baldwin .
“Why are you putting this in the box labeled ‘Dummies’ that the armourer is going to pull out of?” Bowles said, “Good Morning America” on ABC’s.
“Why would you do this other than try to cause an incident on the set? Well, we’re not saying anyone had any intention of playing tragedy – murder – but they did want to do something to cause a security incident on the set. That’s what we believe happened. “
When Good Morning America host Michael Strahan Bowles pressed for evidence to back up his “very, very serious allegation”, Gutierrez Reed’s agent alleged that his client did not put the live ammunition in the ammunition box that the Hutchins eventually did on New. Mexico’s Bonanza Creek Ranch hit in the chest.
“We know the live rounds shouldn’t have been in that box, but they were,” continued Bowles.
“So there can be very, very few explanations as to why live rounds end up in a box of artificial prop ammunition on a movie set. And one of those is that someone wants that to be put in a gun and then wants an incident to happen on the set. There’s no other reason to mix a live round with the dummies. There simply aren’t any. “
After Bowles and his co-attorney Robert Gorence made the same argument on Wednesday’s episode of NBC’s “Today” show, presenter Savannah Guthrie asked why anyone had “the motive and opportunity” behind the scenes of the Baldwin western to place such a security risk.
“I think that if someone would want to prove a point, they want to say they are upset,” Bowles told Guthrie.
“And we know that people had left the set the day before. … And the reason they were dissatisfied is that they work 12-14 hours a day. They were not given hotel rooms in and around the area. So they had to drive back and forth to Albuquerque for an hour and are unhappy. “
According to the Los Angeles Times timeline of the events leading up to the shooting, the Rust camera crew had actually carried out a strike in advance of the incident and were fed up with the unreasonable working conditions.
At the mention of the strike, Guthrie interrupted Bowles again to confirm whether he was accusing the disgruntled crew members of placing live ammunition.
“You can’t shut anyone out at this point,” Bowles said. “We know there was a live lap in a box of dummy laps that shouldn’t have been. …
“We have people who left the set, who left because they were upset. We have a timeframe between 11 and 1 [p.m.], around the day the firearms were temporarily unattended. So there was an opportunity to manipulate the scene. And yes, we are examining this possibility. “
A representative of the crew members leaving the Rust set declined to comment when the Times reached him on Wednesday.
From the very beginning of filming, Rust’s production managers have expressed concerns about the level of experience of 24-year-old Gutierrez Reed, who was responsible for all weapons on set and had previously only served as head armor in one film.
Late last month, production chief electrician blamed Gutierrez Reed and the producers for “negligence” that led to Hutchins’ death – arguing that “there is no way a twenty-four year old woman can be a professional with an arsenal”.
Gutierrez Reed’s attorneys questioned this characterization on Wednesday, claiming that her client acquired extensive gun knowledge while watching her father, an industry-renowned gun professional, on film sets from the age of 10 on Gutierrez Reed’s inexperience, but of “one.” Production set where they didn’t “provides sufficient resources.
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