The weapons supervisor for the film Rust has been jailed for 18 months following the fatal shooting of the film’s cinematographer on set.
Hannah Gutierrez, 26, was sentenced today after being found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by jurors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, following a trial.
She was in charge of weapons during the production of the western film in October 2021, when a Colt 45 revolver fired by actor and co-producer Alec Baldwin went off during a rehearsal.
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died following the incident, while director Joel Souza was injured.
Jurors sitting on Gutierrez’s trial reached their verdict after a two-week trial during which they heard evidence from dozens of witnesses, including eyewitnesses, FBI evidence analysts and an ammunition supplier to Rust, as well as Mr Souza, during a 10-day trial.
A statement from Ms Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, was read aloud to the court during Gutierrez’s sentencing.
In it, she said her life had been split in two and that time didn’t heal, rather it only prolonged her pain and suffering.
“It’s the hardest thing to lose a child. There are no words to describe,” Ms Solovey, who is from Ukraine, said.
Image: Halyna Hutchins. Pic: Shutterstock
‘You turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon’
Handing Gutierrez the maximum sentence, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said a conditional discharge was not appropriate and that leaving the weapons supervisor in a detention centre would “bring you a pass you do not deserve”.
“I did not hear you take responsibility in your allocution, you said you were sorry but not you were ‘sorry for what you did’. It was your attorney that had to tell the court you were remorseful,” the judge said.
“The term remorse, a deep regret coming from a sense of guilt for past wrongs, that’s not you.”
She said Gutierrez’s actions amounted to a “serious, violent offence” that was “committed in a physically violent manner”.
“You were the armourer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon,” the judge added.
“If not for you, Ms Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother.”
Prosecutors blamed Gutierrez for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set where it was prohibited and for failing to follow basic gun safety protocols.
They had urged the judge to impose an 18-month sentence and designate Gutierrez-Reed as a “serious violent offender” to limit her eligibility for a sentence reduction later.
But defence lawyers said the weapons supervisor will forever be affected negatively by intense publicity associated with her prosecution in parallel with an A-list actor, and has suffered from anxiety, fear and depression as a result.
After the verdict, her legal team had requested a new trial and asked for her to be released from prison.
What is happening with Baldwin’s case?
Image: Alec Baldwin pictured on the set of Rust
Baldwin, 66, a producer for the film as well as its star, is also charged with involuntary manslaughter and faces a separate trial on 10 July. He has denied any wrongdoing.
His trial is being overseen by the same judge who sentenced Gutierrez-Reed.
Baldwin was originally charged in January 2023, more than a year after the shooting. Those charges were dropped a few months later based on evidence the hammer of the revolver might have been modified, allowing it to fire without the trigger being pulled.
The star was then charged again in January this year.
Baldwin has said he pulled back the gun’s hammer – but not the trigger – and the weapon fired.
His legal team has filed a motion calling for the charges to be dropped once again. Prosecutors responded to this last week, filing a 32-page documentwhich claims that footage of the star on set shows he had “absolutely no control of his own emotions” and “no concern for how his conduct” affected those around him.
Assistant director David Halls, who also faced charges, entered a plea bargain for negligent use of a deadly weapon last year, receiving a six-month suspended sentence.
At least two people have been killed and eight others critically injured in a shooting on the campus of Brown University in Rhode Island, officials have said.
The incident is believed to be unfolding near an engineering building on the campus, according to the school’s alert system.
Providence Police and the Rhode Island State Police are responding.
It is unclear at the moment whether arrests have been made.
Brown University says no suspects are in custody and that additional shots may have been fired.
US President Donald Trump corrected an earlier post he shared online, clarifying that a suspect was not in custody. In his previous post, he had stated that a suspect was in custody.
University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, but later said this was not the case and police were still searching for a suspect or suspects.
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Officials noted that the information remained preliminary as investigators try to determine what has occurred.
Police are actively investigating and still gathering information from the scene, said Kristy DosReis, the chief public information officer for the city of Providence.
The shooting was reported near the Barus & Holley building, a seven-storey structure that houses the School of Engineering and Physics Department, according to the school’s website.
It includes 117 laboratories, 150 offices and 15 classrooms.
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Brown is a private university with roughly 7,300 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate students.
Providence Council member John Goncalves, whose ward includes the Brown campus, said: “We’re still getting information about what’s going on, but we’re just telling people to lock their doors and to stay vigilant.
“As a Brown alum, someone who loves the Brown community and represents this area, I’m heartbroken. My heart goes out to all the family members and the folks who’ve been impacted.”
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has said the US “will retaliate” after three Americans were killed in a suspected Islamic State attack in Syria.
Two US service members and one civilian died and three other people were injured in an ambush on Saturday by a lone IS – also often called ISIS in Syria and Iraq – gunman, according to the he US military’s Central Command.
The attack on US troops in Syria is the first to inflict fatalities since the fall of President Bashar Assad a year ago.
“This is an ISIS attack,” the US president told reporters at the White House before leaving for the Army-Navy football game in Baltimore.
He paid condolences to the three people killed and said the three others who were wounded “seem to be doing pretty well”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump said “there will be very serious retaliation”.
The shooting took place near historic Palmyra, according to the state-run SANA news agency, and the casualties were taken by helicopter to the al Tanf garrison near the border with Iraq and Jordan.
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The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attacker was a member of the Syrian security force.
Syria’s Interior Ministry spokesman Nour al Din al Baba said authorities are looking into whether the gunman was an IS member or only carried its extreme ideology, and denied reports suggesting he was a security member.
Central Command earlier said in a post on X that the gunman was killed, while the identities of the service members killed wouldn’t be released until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the civilian killed in the attack was a US interpreter.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X: “Let it be known, if you target Americans – anywhere in the world – you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
The US has hundreds of troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting IS.
The group was defeated on the battlefield in Syria in 2019 but the UN says the group still has between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, and its sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al Sharaa, made a historic visit to Washington DC last month as Syria signed a political cooperation agreement with the US-led coalition against IS.
“This was an ISIS attack against the US, and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them,” Mr Trump said in his social media post, adding that Mr al Sharaa was “extremely angry and disturbed”.