Gun Handed to Alec Baldwin Was Not Thoroughly Checked, Affidavit Says

A total of 500 rounds of ammunition were recovered from the set, including a mix of blanks, dummy rounds and live ammunition, Sheriff Mendoza said.

A lot of attention has been paid to Mr. Halls and Ms Gutierrez-Reed in recent days because they handled the gun before it went off.

Several complaints have been levelled against Mr. Halls, an industry veteran who has worked on films like “Fargo” and “The Matrix Reloaded,” and he was fired from the movie “Freedom’s Path” in 2019 after a gun accidentally discharged, injuring a crew member. The fatal shooting on “Rust” set was preceded by at least two accidental discharges of guns, according to three former crew members. We tried to get in touch with Mr. Halls several times but he did not respond.

During a podcast interview last month, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who also goes by the names Hannah Reed and Hannah Gutierrez, revealed that she had just finished filming her first role as head armourer in Clint Howard and Nicolas Cage’s upcoming western “The Old Way.” As Ms. Gutierrez-Reed recalled in the podcast “Voices of the West,” “I was nervous about it at first and almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready.” A film industry consultant and shooting expert, her father, Thell Reed, is her father’s daughter.

At the beginning of the lunch break, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed informed the detective that the firearms were stored in a “prop truck” safe. According to the affidavit, which was filed in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court and was used to request a search warrant for the “prop truck,” some ammunition was left on a cart, where it was “not secured,” and some was kept in the truck.

Prop master Sarah Zachry, who worked on the film, retrieved the firearms from a safe at the end of lunch and handed them over to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, the armourer, according to the detective’s recollection of what happened.