Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - 'Rust' Armorer Convicted, Alec Baldwin Next?

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer in charge of the guns in the film "Rust," has been found guilty of manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Hutchins was killed when star Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun during rehearsal loaded with live ammo instead of a blank round. Reports say first assistant director David Halls picked up one of the three prop guns that had been set up by armorer Hannah Gutierrez and yelled, “Cold gun.” "Cold gun" is industry slang meaning the gun did not contain live rounds. Halls gave the gun to Baldwin who was using the gun to rehearse a scene. The search warrant said Baldwin was aiming the weapon at the camera when he fired, striking Hutchins and Souza. Reports have surfaced that the weapon was used for target practice by crew members that morning. Gutierrez Reed faces up to 18 months in prison at sentencing in April.  Baldwin has also been charged. His trial starts in July.  Joining Nancy Grace today: Paul Szych – Former Police Commander (Albuquerque, NM), APD Domestic Violence and Stalking Unit; Author: “Stop Him From KillingThem;” X: @WorkplaceThreatt; Screen Actors Guild-Eligible Actor (experience using firearms with blanks during live-action movie scenes/Terminator: Salvation) Domenic Romano - NY Corporate Lawyer and Entertainment Attorney, Romano Law  Dr. Shari Schwartz– Forensic Psychologist (specializing in Capital Mitigation and Victim Advocacy); Twitter: @TrialDoc; Author: “Criminal Behavior” and “Where Law and Psychology Intersect: Issues in Legal Psychology” Karen L. Smith – Forensic Expert, Lecturer at the University of Florida, Host of ‘Shattered Souls’ Podcast; Twitter: @KarensForensic Dr. Michelle DuPre – Former Forensic Pathologist, Medical Examiner and Detective: Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, Author: “Homicide Investigation Field Guide” & “Investigating Child Abuse Field Guide;” Forensic Consultant Alexis Tereszcuk – CrimeOnline.com Investigative Reporter, Writer/Fact Checker for Lead Stories; X: @swimmie2009 Learn more about your ad choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. In the last days, the armorer for the movie Rust, starring Alec Baldwin is found guilty of homicide in the shooting death of a young wife and mom, cinematographer Helena Hutchins. Is Alec Baldwin next? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thanks for being with us here at Crime Stories and on Sirius XM 111. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed found guilty of homicide in the shooting death of the Rust cinematographer Helena Hutchins. Gutierrez-Reed shows very little emotion, if any, when the verdict was read. Now, is Alec Baldwin, the movie and TV star, next? He's set to go on trial in the same courthouse for manslaughter. That's right, the

armorer. That is movie talk for the person in charge of all the guns and explosives used on a movie set. The armorer for the Alec Baldwin movie Rust, guilty in the shooting death of Helena Hutchins. The jury determined Gutierrez-Reed negligently allowed a live bullet in the gun on the set of the Western Baldwin used to shoot dead Helena Hutchins. It just took two hours of deliberations at the courthouse in santa fe new mexico for a jury to find reed guilty on manslaughter they acquitted her on the charge of tampering with evidence now gutierrez reed is the daughter of a very well respected industry armorer thale reed and she's facing about two years in jail 18 months to be exact she showed no emotion but one family member did break down in the courtroom that family member sitting behind

Reed the judge Mary Sumner remanded that means sent Gutierrez Reed in custody telling her the reason is because you're now convicted. It's criminal negligence, true, but still a death. Does the verdict against Hannah Gutierrez-Reed spell trouble for Alec Baldwin when he goes on trial in July in the same courthouse for manslaughter? He faces jail time as well if found guilty. What do we know? The sheriff's office there has just confirmed it was Baldwin who fired the prop gun that killed a 42-year-old female director of photography, Helena Hutchins. The film's director, Joel Souza, was also hurt. This incident happened on the set of the Western Rust.

You were just hearing our friend Christine Johnson with CBS. What really happened? According to reports, the assistant yelled out cold gun just before the shooting, which means the gun was safe, that it was loaded with a blank. So how do we have a woman dead, another film person injured? With me, an all-star panel to make sense of it all, if we can. With me, Dominic Romano, lawyer, joining us out of New York at romanolaw.com, his specialty, entertainment law. And I can tell you, somebody's going to need a lawyer.

Dr. Sherry Schwartz, forensic psychologist, joining us. Karen L. Smith, forensic expert, host of Shattered Souls podcast at barebonesforensics.com. Paul Zyke joining us, special guest, former police commander and author of Stop Him From Killing Them on Amazon. And he has lots of experience using firearms with blanks during live action movie scenes like Terminator, Salvation, Dr. Michelle Dupree, forensic pathologist, former medical examiner, author of Homicide Investigation Field Guide, and a former police detective. But first to Alexis Tereschuk, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter joining us from Hollywood. Alexis, what is getting folded into the story, right or wrong, is Alec Baldwin's history.

His reputation for, let me just say, hot-headedness, to put it euphemistically, if he thought it was a blank and it should have been a blank, then history aside, it was an accident. But how can it really be an accident when somebody loaded this prop gun with real bullets? You know what? Just start at the beginning. They were on a set in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's a Western style movie. So they were sitting in a church, an old church scene, and Alec Baldwin was sitting in one of the pews,

and he was practicing what's called a cross draw. And so that would be where the person, they take your left hand and grabs the gun out of the holster on the opposite hip, pulls it across to fire. He was practicing this move, standing the cinematographer which is the person that makes the movie beautiful. This is the person that films the scene. She was standing in front of him with the assistant director

standing right behind her. He was looking over her shoulder to see what it would look like when Alex pulled the gun out. He pulls it out of the side, points it at her to show them, pulls the trigger, and it fires a live round into her, hits her in the stomach, and actually, I believe, goes through her and grazes the director standing right behind her.

Hush is pronounced dead at an Albuquerque hospital after being rushed to the emergency room. You know what? I always love playing 911 calls for a jury because it takes you back to what's really happening. Not a description, not someone recounting what happened, but you're hearing what really happened. Take a listen to the beginning of that 911 call. 911, what's the location of your emergency? We need an ambulance

out at Bonanza Creek Ranch right now. We've had two people shot on a movie set accidentally. You said someone was shot? Two people accidentally were gunshot at our movie set, Bonanza Creek Ranch. I'll connect you with medical

dispatch. I don't need a... Who are you calling? Clear the road. San Jose Fire and EMS, what's the location of the emergency? Bonanza Creek Ranch has two people accidentally shot on a movie set by a pop gun. We need help immediately. Bonanza Creek Ranch, come on. Stay on the phone with me. We're going to get some help, okay? Okay.

What is your name? Mamie Mitchell. Miss Mitchell, what's the phone number you're calling from? Five up. Don't hang up, okay? Hold on just one second. Okay. sounds like somebody else is calling for two and a half everybody should be we need some help

director and our cameraman has been shot now you hear repeatedly the word accident accidentally throughout that but is it an accident? Very often when you have, for instance, a DUI crash, people go, well, it was an accident. But was it? Because the driver chooses to go to a bar to order drinks, to drink, to become legally

intoxicated, to then get the car keys, walk to the car, get in the car, crank up, reverse, and drive out onto the roads. That sounds pretty deliberate. So is it an accident? Is it gross negligence? Well, take a listen to more of that 911 call. So was it loaded with a real bullet or what? I cannot tell you that. Okay. We have two injuries from a movie gun shot. one call. revision. We all ran out. They were doubled over the ID and the camera woman and the director. We're clearing the road.

Can you come back? We're back in the town. We're back in the western town. Is there any serious bleeding? I don't know. I ran out of the building. I still have to go through these, okay? Are they completely alert? We don't know. I'm hearing a lot of discussion in the background. You hear the speaker talking to somebody else about someone yelling at her and Lutch about script revision.

And she says she's supposed to check the gun. He's responsible for what happened. No, no, I'm a script supervisor. So I don't know a lot about movie sets. I can tell you more about a murder trial, but I know this, a script supervisor should not be checking dangerous weapons. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. In the last days, the armorer for the Alec Baldwin movie, Rust, is found guilty of homicide by a jury. Will the next shoe to drop be the conviction of movie star Alec Baldwin?

Hannah Gutierrez Reid's defense at trial was basically to blame everybody else but herself, especially Alec Baldwin. Reid's lawyer, Jason Bowles, kept repeating over and over that Baldwin, Alec Baldwin was the, quote, big boss on the set that nobody would stand up to, even though he rushed people and the rights to the script, that136,000 fine on the producers for serious safety failings. She's a scapegoat? Well, the jury disagreed. What do we know? Paul Zyke, joining us, special guest, former police commander and author of Stop Him From Killing Them.

He's with the Screen Actors Guild, and he has experience using firearms with blanks during live action movie scenes. I could go on, but I think that sums it up for today. Paul Zyke, thank you for being with us. What went wrong? Obviously, there was a live bullet in what should have been a prop gun, but what happened? Nancy, the only explanation for this is a systemic breakdown in systems that are in place to ensure that live ammunition is not present on the set. Okay, now that was a lot of words, Paul Zyke. I think you're saying somebody didn't do their job?

Well, absolutely. Somebody did not do their job and catastrophically did not do that. There's no reason whatsoever for live ammunition to be on the set of any set because these weapons are capable of firing live rounds. They're not really prop guns. They're deadly weapons being used as props. Okay, hold on right there. I want to make that distinction. You're absolutely right.

When, look, I'm a trial lawyer. I'm a legal expert. You're the expert in this world. When I say prop gun, I mean they're using it as a prop. But you're making a very fine, subtle, but important distinction. A prop gun is a fake gun. I don't think it even can shoot. Is that right?

Exactly. You're talking about, say, a prop knife, correct? It has a flat edge on it. It's incapable of cutting you. These are things that are capable of firing live ammunition. And therefore, accidentally, live ammunition could be mixed with blank rounds. You know, given time, this is just a disaster waiting to happen. They need to move to true prop guns that are incapable of chambering live ammunition.

Until that happens, this has a very strong chance of repeating itself. Well, okay. Tell me this, Paul Zeit. Guys, with me, Paul Zeit, he is a former police commander. He's an author, screen actor's gill, and has experience using blanks during live action movie scenes where we all think they're shooting real guns. If you suspend your disbelief in movies like his Terminator Salvation, those aren't real guns. So why are they using a real gun to start with, Paul Zyke?

And I mean, to me, having been forced to handle so many guns and so many homicides, what moron wouldn't make sure that there were blanks in the gun it's hard to imagine that during the loading of the weapon that that was not uh viewed very strictly um as as the weapon is loaded and also there's a chain of custody issue here on the scene of terminator salvation as we would go out and we would conduct a battle scene, if you will, in the middle of the night, we would be handed directly from the armor, fully automatic weapons and magazines fully loaded with blanks. And we would head straight out to where the scene was to be shot. And then we would engage in the scene, you know,

five, 10 minutes later, hand the weapons straight back to the armor, all the ammunition back to the armor, all the magazines back to the armor. And we would not be able to touch those weapons again until the next scene. So from a chain of custody standpoint, it went directly from the armor directly to my hand, my, you know, the co-actor's hands that were with me. And that was maintained very strictly. Hold on, Paul. I've got to soak in everything you're saying because Dominic Romano, a high profile lawyer joining us out of New York is specialty entertainment law. That's why Dominic's joining us today. Dominic, hold on. When you heard Paul Zykes say chain of custody, I immediately thought of a serial murderer that I prosecuted

on one murder. We could get him on one. And there ended up, I would say three weeks before trial, I was just looking at the evidence and I noticed that the bag that contained the evidence wasn't signed. It had never been signed by the homicide cop that picked it up from, it was DNA in there, it was blood, from where it had been taken and carried to the crime lab. It wasn't written on the back. Did anybody tamper with it? No. He just didn't put his initials.

I'm like, oh, dear Lord in heaven, the chain is broken. This could be attacked at trial. I had to go back out to the jail, stand there and look at this killer while he pulled his blood again. Then I carried it with my investigator, myself, back to the crime lab to have it retested. Praise the Lord in heaven, it was his DNA. Long story short, that's chain of custody. Your case can be lost. You can lose a serial killer because somebody didn't keep the chain to preserve the integrity of the trial. That's what I thought when Paul Zyke said chain of custody. But did you also hear him say Dominic Romano, he handed it back to the, it sounded like he was saying armor

or armory, but I've been reading about this case. It's an armorer armorer armorer who is the person in charge of all the weapons hey somebody's either going to jail or they're going to lose their house over a lawsuit dominant romano i think you're right nancy and i think paul is absolutely right look in 2021 no one should ever be killed by a gun on a film set, period. Those are the words of Brandon Lee's sister. Brandon Lee shot on a film set in the early 1990s. This should not happen. There are established protocols, chains of command. Nancy said someone either going to jail or lose their house is highly likely here.

I mean, there appears to be some serious gross negligence on that set to allow that to happen. That is the appearance. And I don't know what evidence can come out to rebut that presumption. A live round in, well, as Paul Zyke has corrected me, it's not a prop gun. They were using real guns. Hey, let me ask you a question, Paul Zyke. Explain the difference in what a blank looks like as opposed to a live round, a bullet. When we're saying live rounds, we're talking about a bullet. What's the difference? Can't you just look at them and you can see the difference? In most cases, absolutely. It's very clear you can see the difference. In some types of calibers, say.223, if you will, that's what an AR-15 would shoot,

the blanks are kind of crimped at the end to almost look like there's a bullet on the end of them. But any sort of trained professional whatsoever, when you're handling a blank, you know it's a blank. When it's a bullet, you know it's a blank. When it's a bullet, you know it's a bullet. The blank does not have a lead projectile or a steel projectile at the end of the round. So at the end, it's either flat or it's slightly crimped to hold in the gunpowder, which, you know, the firearm usually needs the gunpowder to correctly function the weapon and cycle the weapon, and it's one of the reasons why blanks are used. Prosecutors call the armorer for the Alec Baldwin movie, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed,

quote, sloppy in handling guns and ammo. Even staying in the opening statement of that prosecutor's, Jason Lewis, good lawyer, said she, quote, routinely left guns and ammo lying around the set unattended, that the gun safe and ammo cart were constantly disorganized. He also said the prospect of live ammunition landing up on a film set is incomprehensible. It should never happen. And he's right. Why do a bunch of movie stars need to have

guns with live ammo in them? The jury was even shown photos taken by a crime scene investigator that shows the chaotic way in which the ammunition and guns were stored, all the set of rust. They didn't even have the guns locked away, as is standard practices. Images, photos, showed at trial, shows a gun which could have fired live rounds just sitting on top of the cart. Loose rounds of all sorts of calibers were scattered everywhere, and Gutierrez-Reed actually kept them in a fanny pack with a can of Red Bull. Okay, that's professional. We now know another live round was found in a box of bullets from which Gutierrez-Reed said she got the ammo to put in Baldwin's gun. Okay, right there. There's your guilty verdict.

Gutierrez-Reed is stating she got the ammo, which contained live rounds, to put in Baldwin's gun. Hello? Now, even though that round is visibly different to the fake bullets and even had a bright silver primer on the back, that was something the others didn't have. In one damning moment at trial, Corporal Alexandra Hancock from Santa Fe County Sheriff's asked Gutierrez-Reed if the silver primer on that live bullet didn't stick out when she loaded the gun. Gutierrez-Reed responds, no. The corporal then goes to say, you didn't notice the rest of them were not the same color? She says, no, I would not want her in charge of ammunition. And I want to follow up with Alexis Tereschuk.

On the Alec Baldwin set of Rust, there apparently were problems with working conditions. A group of the crew had walked out, I think the night before, claiming that they had bad hotels. They were an hour away from a hotel or motel. And if they worked late into the night, they'd have to drive through, I guess, the desert. And a lot of them were actually sleeping in their cars overnight. That's just some of the complaints I've heard. But what are the other complaints, if any, on the Alec Baldwin movie set? Well, there have been complaints that things were not safe, quote.

But one of the person that is being directly blamed for a lot of the unsafe is when you were listening to the 911 call and you said you heard the woman saying that he was yelling at me, things like that. This is the assistant director that they're talking about. And this is the assistant director, David Halls, who handed the gun to Baldwin and said, this is a cold gun. So what the people on the set were saying is that Halls was not a responsible person. He was very angry. He was making the job very difficult for everybody to do. And they didn't trust him. Wait a minute. You're saying David Halls was an assistant director?

Yes. Okay. Well, what about the honorer isn't she the one responsible for all the weapons and the and the uh the blanks or the bullets karen l smith forensic expert host of shattered souls podcast at barebonesforensic.com weigh in karen smith well we deal a lot with forensics uh in physics when we do a reconstruction we use snippets time, and sometimes that can be split seconds. And this includes trajectories of projectiles. And this trajectory can generally be explained by the reporting. Alec Baldwin was reported to be sitting at a church pew to align a camera angle when the gun was fired. Helena Hutchins then collapsed on the floor, and Joel Souza was struck in the clavicle.

That's an upward trajectory, which means both Hutchins and Souza were standing up when the event occurred. The projectile that perforated Helena's body and subsequently struck Joel. Now, in order for that to happen, the kinetic energy, which is energy as the result of motion, would be very high. We're dealing with mass or the amount of matter in an object, and energy dispersion. Guns carry a high volume of energy in a small space, and that, from my experience, it tells me that it was something other than

just the paper or plastic wadding from a blank round. That needs to be confirmed by the ME and the investigators, but there are reports of live ammunition, bullets on the set and that particular gun allegedly being used for target practice that morning. A gun for the set being used as target practice. Paul's like that. That shouldn't be that. You've got crew members out shooting bottles i i think that that's coming out with live bullets and use that same gun for a scene and and and a church full of people and nancy i just want to clarify the prior point

so very simply a blank is is a is a shell casing with gunpowder in it with no bullet a bullet is the same exact thing with more gunpowder and a live bullet at the end of it that is made to travel through the barrel and exit the weapon. But back to what you were saying, that's a cardinal rule that's been broken. Whether you're involved in police training or you're involved in a movie set, keeping live ammunition away from weapons that fire live ammunition and keeping weapons that fire blanks away from those instances. And when you mix those two together, the odds of somebody having a spare live round in one of their pockets or you name it is super high.

And that sounds very sloppy. And it just opens the door for terrible things to happen, and that's where the systemic breakdown in that controlled environment. I'm telling you, Paul Zyke, you're right. Super sloppy is one way to put it. Gross negligence or unintentional murder is another way to put it. I think I hear Dominic Romano jumping in. Go ahead.

Basically, it's a catastrophic miscalculation. I think two people here we should focus on. One is the armor, right? This is only, according to reports, her second movie with Charis Reid. And the assistant director, Dave Hall, as you mentioned before. According to reports, he was fired from a 2019 production of freedom's past minor injury whoa wait a minute whoa whoa whoa wait wait you got me drinking from the fire hydrant which is not a bad thing it's too much at once hold on why in the world would you have

somebody that was fired off another similar job handling your weapon okay Is that what you just said, Dominic? Okay. Almost. Almost. So the armorer is 24 years old. The person handling the weapons. It's only her second film. She was just in a podcast where she said, you know, she's a bit nervous about her film, but it went well. Her father is apparently a famous armorer. Okay. So we have that.

An inexperienced armorer. Number two, we have the assistant director known as the AD, Dave Hulse. Apparently, according to a report, he was fired from a 2019 production. The movie was Freedom Path. After a crew member suffered, guess what? A minor injury when a gun unexpectedly discharged. Dominic Romano, the word similar transactions are jumping to mind. I mean, if there is a trial, you know that previous incident is going to come in.

I mean, this solidifies my thought that this is not an accident because an accident is when you totally don't see it coming. It's just like out of the blue. But if this guy, if it's correct, the AD had a previous incident where somebody was shot on a set, even if it was a minor injury, then you should have seen, you either knew or should have known. Would you agree with that, Dominic Romano? There are going to be some serious questions to be asked and there have to be answers. And if we don't have good answers, someone is either going to be involved in a very expensive lawsuit or depending on what they knew and when they knew it and how careless they were, probably facing some time. The other issue you alluded to earlier is cost cutting. It's rampant in the industry right now.

And the production company's decision not to book the crew hotel rooms near the actual set, but to have them travel an hour in each direction to get to and from their accommodation, to have long hours where people walked off the set earlier that day in protest. So this is a combination of what turned out to be a lethal combination, a catastrophic calculation on the part of the production company. Well, you just said a mouthful all in a good way between the armorer being inexperienced, the AD having a prior similar transaction, and budget cuts, problems amongst the crew. Take a listen to our cut six from our friends at News Nation now. Let's start with the people responsible for handling a gun.

There are no ubiquitous rules across all film sets, but generally there are some guidelines that they follow adhering to a budget. Budget usually plays a big role. On many sets, there are no fewer than three people responsible for monitoring a weapon. A prop master, who's in charge of all props, is often supported by a safety officer and a stunt coordinator. And depending on the state, you may also need to bring in an armorer, whose only job is handling weapons. An armorer is required by New Mexico state law. So the point is, just like Dominic Romano was saying, budget plays a big role.

Well, you know what? You can tell that to the victim and the victim's child and husband. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. After one guilty verdict by a jury in the shooting death of cinematographer Helena Hutchins, will the next shoe to drop be the conviction of movie star Alec Baldwin? Now, Gutierrez-Reed at trial, the jury was also shown behind the scenes videos from filming and it showed what firearms experts claim are gross breaches of safety. One shows Gutierrez-Reed holding a shotgun with the muzzle face up, pointing straight at her own face. Is she crazy?

In another scene caught on video, a male actor points a gun at a 12-year-old boy who was part of the cast. Especially chilling now that we know there were live rounds on the set at a 12-year-old boy. What more do we know? Dr. Michelle Dupree, forensic pathologist, former medical examiner, author of Homicide Investigation Field Guide, and a former police detective. Dr. Dupree, I'm sure you, like myself, have had to handle weapons in front of juries. And I learned this from watching a pro try cases. I would always pick the gun up, holding it face down with a barrel pointing to the ground. So the jury or anyone else would not be alarmed. What you don't want to do is scare your jury. I would walk in front of the jury,

holding the weapon nose down, open the chamber, let them see me check it, hold it up like I was examining it through, you know, my eye level so they could see that it was empty and then shut it and then give it to the witness without fail. Even if it was a weapon that I knew was inoperable, that was S.O.P. Why would that not occur on a movie set? But describe how you're supposed to handle weapons. Exactly, Nancy. You described it perfectly. That is exactly what you should do. And if you're giving a weapon to someone else, normally you have the chamber open so that they can also see. And then you both check it and know that it's empty or that

the blanks are in it. Tell me what you can discern about what Karen Smith, forensics expert, just told us about the injuries. What happened? Nancy, even though these are, quote, prop guns or blanks, they can still obviously do devastating damage. The wadding or whatever they are filled with, even in a blank. But this was not a blank. This was an actual projectile. And as we know. You mean a bullet? Speak English, please.

A bullet. Yes. Yes, this was a bullet. And the caliber of that bullet, of the gun, is what is going to determine how much damage is done. As she explained, the higher the caliber, the more energy in that bullet. And so the more damage done to the physical body. And, of course, the location where that bullet enters the body, in this case, was devastating. You know, another issue to Dr. Sherry Schwartz,

I've been on a lot of TV sets, obviously, and movie sets for, you know, cameos or some legal issue. And I got to tell you, Dr. Sherry Schwartz, a movie set takes on a whole, it's like you're in a different world. Like when you go to the movies and you sit down and it goes dark, your mind takes you there. When you're on a movie set, I've never been on a single movie set that went on time. You go till one or two o'clock in the morning. It's pitch dark outside. You keep going until you get the shot or you finish the scene or whatever it's called in movie world, I think that there is a suspended fear. You think you're at a movie set, like when you go to Disneyland or when you're on vacation on a cruise ship, you suspend your normal thinking. It doesn't seem real. And you're not

thinking, wow, there's a gun. I could get shot because it's quote, just a movie. It's not real. How do we, let me just say, suspend our disbelief, suspend rational rules of functioning when you're on a movie set or in a movie. You know, like in movies where there's some nut with a gun and you hear a sound, but you don't think it's real because you're in a movie. What happens in the human mind, Dr. Sherry? Well, when you don't think that something is actually real, then you would not calculate accurately what the potential risks are. Right. And so there is this gun on the set, but everybody thinks, oh, it's just make-believe. We're setting this up to film it. Nobody's actually going to get hurt. And so what

happens mentally is that you underestimate what the potential risks are. And what happened here is an egregious underestimation, right? So for the rest of us, it's make-believe. Maybe even for the actor, they know that they're just playing a role, and everybody around them might know they're playing a role, but there are people on the set who are responsible for that gun and for taking that proper care and knowing what the potential risks are. Back to you, Alexis Teresha, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. You have heard Dominic Romano, Paul Zeit, well, everyone on the panel weighing in. But apparently there were a lot of problems and a lot of disgruntled crew members. I understand that one of the motels they had set them up to stay overnight was at a place for the homeless.

And there were drug addicts uh there they were afraid to stay there what was going on on the set well it seems like what they were trying to do was make this film as cheaply as possible understandable but they were putting people's lives at risk it was 50s hotels were 50 miles away so after working 14 hour days the crew was having to drive over an hour to get to their hotel. Then they would have to be back within like six hours. So they would get almost no sleep at all. They were also saying that things were just not safe. There had been an incident a few days earlier that one of the prop guns, again, prop gun, real gun had been accidentally fired. And so the crew has been complaining to the producers saying,

this is not a safe working environment. And they walked off the set. And so Hollywood is very much a union business, but the producers hired non-union people to replace them. These non-union people, though, are not the people. It's not the armorer and it's not the assistant director. And everybody's been talking. There is a line of protocol.

You have so many steps in the line of defense so that when this gun got to Alex Baldwin, at least two other people were responsible for saying that it wasn't loaded. I mean, didn't somebody even scream out, cold gun? Yes. I mean, they have to yell it out. You know what? You were just loaded. I mean, didn't somebody even scream out cold gun? I mean, they have to yell it out. You know what you were just saying?

I know so many times for different shoots, I don't know who he is that carries that, comes over and they have to do it a certain way. They have to say a certain thing and they say it really loudly. I don't know why, but I'm sure there's a reason for it. Just like they would yell out cold gun and everybody would hear it. But I guess they

yelled it out without checking, Alexis. And there are reports that, yes, so there were three guns that were set up and they were put on a table outside the church set. And this is because of COVID-19 protocols. So not a lot of people are in the, if it's an enclosed set, they're not there. Three guns. So the assistant director picked it up, Dave Halls, as the other guest said, has a history of a lot of accidents on sets

and handed it to Baldwin. And he is the one that yelled out, cold gun. There's no, nobody has said, there's so many people have spoken to the police on the set, so many of the other crew members. And they said they didn't know whether it actually was empty or not. And these guns were used at lunch.

This is a post lunch break. So they broke for lunch at 1230. They come back after lunch. During that lunchtime, there are reports that the crew members were using this gun and other guns to shoot beer bottles out in the desert area and using it as target practice. So there could have been a live. And Mary said there was lots of live ammunition.

Nobody was told they couldn't bring live ammunition on set. That's another thing. Why do you need a live round on set? That's the big problem here is that paul jump in yeah i'd like to jump in there it's it's uh it's simply a breakdown of of the security of the scene the only people there that are armed should be security personnel and you know in my years my decade of fighting to keep workplaces safe and to stop stalking offenders from killing victims. I can tell you one thing, and that is nobody thinks the unthinkable is going to happen.

It's a matter of just human thinking. They think that, well, that happened to somebody else. It didn't happen to me. And because this is somewhat of a rare occurrence on set, people got laxed. They got lackadaisical about fundamental when it comes to shooting a scene occurrence on set. People got laxed. They got lackadaisical about fundamental when it comes to shooting a scene such as this. And just like at any workplace, this is a workplace out in the middle of the desert,

just like it would be in an office building. Those protocols broke down and people at work attempting to do the right thing for the right reasons had a catastrophic, devastating thing happen because we as human beings think, well, if it hasn't happened, it won't happen. And that's just not the reality of life when it comes to dangerous events. A chaotic, shambolic movie set leaves a wife and a mother dead. The movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed,

guilty on negligent involuntary homicide, is movie star Alec Baldwin the next to go down? We wait as justice unfolds. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.