Rust armourer’s lawyers admit gun was left unattended before fatal shooting

Lawyers for the armourer on the set of the movie Rust, where Alec Baldwin accidentally shot a cinematographer dead, have admitted that the gun was left unattended for some time before Mr Baldwin picked it up.

Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence, the attorneys for armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, deny that she was responsible for the tragic incident. On Wednesday, they told The Today Show and The New York Times that the gun, along with two others, had been left unwatched on a prop cart for two hours, though they later changed this timeframe to five to 10 minutes.

“Was there a duty to safeguard them 24/7?” Mr Gorence said. “The answer is no, because there were no live rounds.”

In fact, however, there was a live round in one of the guns, and when Mr Baldwin used it, it fired a projectile into Rust’s director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, and its director, Joel Souza. Ms Hutchins died of her injuries.

On The Today Show, Mr Bowles theorised that an unknown saboteur may have deliberately put a live round in a box of “dummy” bullets, or fakes.

“I believe that somebody who would do that would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say that they’re disgruntled, they’re unhappy,” Mr Bowles told host Savannah Guthrie.

“We have people who had left the set, who had walked out because they were disgruntled,” he went on. “We have a time frame between 11 (am) and 1 (pm), approximately, that day, in which the firearms at times were unattended, so there was opportunity to tamper with this scene.”

Mr Bowles later backtracked on this detail, telling the Times he had made a mistake, and the guns had only been left for five to 10 minutes.

Ms Gutierrez-Reed, 24, had relatively little experience when she was hired to work on Rust. Her first film as head armourer was the Nicolas Cage movie The Old Way, which was filmed earlier this year. During that production, Ms Gutierrez-Reed allegedly gave a gun to an 11-year-old actor without properly inspecting it for safety, The Daily Beast has reported. The incident briefly shut down production.

“She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again,” an unnamed source told the Beast. “There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.”

But according to crew members, the problem on Rust was not limited to Ms Gutierrez-Reed. Cost-saving measures and reportedly unsatisfactory set conditions resulted in seven IATSE-union crew members walking off the set in protest, just hours before the shooting occurred. Non-union workers were brought in to replace them on the day of the incident.

The Independent has reached out to Ms Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers for comment.