'Rust' armorer was 'very emotional' and 'agitated' after fatal shooting, according to newly released police report
- The Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office released new documents Tuesday related to the "Rust" shooting incident.
- The documents include police reports from the day of the fatal accident.
When police arrived at the scene of the fatal shooting incident on the set of the movie "Rust," they encountered the film's armorer — the person who oversees the use of weapons on a production — appearing emotional and holding a handgun, according to a newly released police report.
The October 21 incident saw actor Alec Baldwin fire a weapon he believed was not loaded. It resulted in the killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of director Joel Souza, whose own account of the shooting was released in a separate police report on Tuesday.
The accident also left armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed distressed. According to a report filed by one of the responding officers, a crew member named Row — an apparent reference to production coordinator Row Walters — directed them to Gutierrez-Reed after they asked to speak with "the person in charge of the prop gun."
The officer then located Reed near the site of the shooting, a structure made to look like a church, and found her walking "with a handgun in her left hand with the muzzle pointing down." They "observed Hanna [sic] to be emotional" and then "took custody of the handgun."
Page 15 of Incident Reports and Supplementals_Bonanza Creek Shooting_2021-007949_Redacted Contributed to DocumentCloud by Insider Staff (Insider Inc.) • View document or read textAccording to the report, the gun in question was an unloaded, six-round revolver. The officer also took possession of two other handguns and two boxes of ammunition "that were labeled colt .45 rounds," one of which Reed described as "the rounds used today."
"Hanna was very emotional and getting more agitated because of the incident," according to the report. "I advised Hanna she was not under arrest several times and put her in the rear of my union with the passenger side door open," the officer wrote. She was then attended to by medical personnel.
It was only the second film on which Gutierrez-Reed, 24, had worked as an armorer. According to a former colleague on the set of an earlier production, she had been screamed at by actor Nicolas Cage for firing blanks without warning near the crew.
Gutierrez-Reed's lawyers, however, insist she has been scapegoated for the failings of a production that saw union staff walk out the day of the incident to protest what they viewed as unsafe working conditions. In a statement, reported by Deadline, they said she "has no idea where the live rounds came from."
Insider reached out to the attorney Jason Bowles for additional comment.
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