'Rust' armorer's lawyers said the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins was left unattended for hours, then backtracked and said it was only 5 to 10 minutes

• Hannah Gutierrez-Reed's lawyers retracted a claim about how long a gun was left unattended.
• They first said it was idle for two hours before Alec Baldwin fatally shot Halyna Hutchins with it.

The lawyers for the armorer on "Rust" retracted their account of how long the gun that killed Halyna Hutchins was left unattended, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is one of several crew members who's been under scrutiny since the actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot Hutchins, a cinematographer, on set while rehearsing a scene on October 21.

Earlier Wednesday, the lawyers, Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence, told the "Today" show that there had been a window of about two hours, roughly 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., during which the firearm was unattended, suggesting that had left room for tampering.

They also said Gutierrez-Reed had loaded the gun from a box marked "dummies." The round that killed Hutchins was a real one, not a dummy.

In that interview they suggested that a "disgruntled" person could have sabotaged the set by putting a real bullet in the box, alluding to a crew members' walkout that had taken place the day before.

In an interview with The Times, they also described a two-hour window of opportunity that included lunchtime, the paper said.

But Bowles later walked back that statement, telling the paper that he had since consulted with Gutierrez-Reed and learned that the gun had been locked up over lunch and therefore was not accessible.

That left only a five- or 10-minute gap in which it was unattended, he said.

Gutierrez-Reed, who worked as a prop handler in addition to her armorer duties, had told colleagues to keep an eye on the gun cart, Bowles told the paper. But she said there were still times it was left unattended that day, he added.

"Rust" was Gutierrez-Reed's second movie as head armorer. Her relative inexperience in the job has put her in the spotlight since Hutchins' death.

A former colleague described Gutierrez-Reed, the 24-year-old daughter of the veteran armorer Thell Reed, as "a bit careless" with guns on the set of an earlier movie, "The Old Way," The Daily Beast first reported.

Another former colleague on the "The Old Way," Jeffrey Crowe, a prop manager, defended her professionalism, saying she had impressed him despite her inexperience.

Other concerns with on-set safety have been raised since the shooting, many of which have prompted scrutiny of other crew members or what's been described as a culture of lax security, Insider's Michelle Mark reported.