A lawyer for the armorer of the Alec Baldwin movie in which the cinematographer was fatally shot claims she’s “being framed.”
Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 24, has been portrayed in media reports as inexperienced in the ongoing investigation into the shooting of Halyna Hutchins last month.
“We are convinced that this was sabotage and Hannah is being framed,” lawyer Jason Bowles said, according to the New York Post. “We believe that the scene was tampered with as well before the police arrived. The truth finding process demands that the District Attorney and FBI run down all of the evidence, including the nature of those live rounds.”
Bowles also claimed his team has “offered to share additional, critical information” with the Sheriff’s Office.
“Hannah continued to cooperate and provided a full interview,” he said. “Information is coming out that needs to be fully investigated and considered by the District Attorney.”
Bowles said his team is “asking for a full and complete investigation of all of the facts, including the live rounds themselves, how they ended up in the ‘dummies’ box, and who put them in there.”
The new claim comes after Baldwin last week shared a lengthy string of social media posts written by a crew member of the Western movie “Rust,” who blasted co-workers for describing the New Mexico set as “chaotic and unsafe.”
Baldwin fatally shot Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza on October 21. He says he was told the gun he was using in a scene was “cold,” meaning unloaded or loaded only with blanks.
“Read this,” Baldwin wrote about the multiple Instagram posts penned by Terese Magpale Davis, who worked in the wardrobe department for the movie.
“I am so sick of this narrative,” Davis wrote in her posts. “I worked on this movie. The story being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe, chaotic conditions is bull***t.”
“We never worked more than a 12.5 hour shoot day. That was once,” Davis wrote. “Most days were under 12. The day Halyna died we had come off of a 12 hour turnaround after an 11 hour shoot day. We had (including camera) gotten off by 6:30pm.”
“We had just had a 56 hour weekend right before that. No one was too tired to do their jobs. This is all provable by daily time sheets.”
Several crew members said they had been given hotel rooms in Santa Fe but were later informed they had to make a 50-mile drive from Albuquerque each day to the set near Sante Fe.
Davis said that isn’t true. “The camera crew HAD hotels. They just didn’t feel they were fancy enough. NOT that they were unsafe. You can’t tell me that 6 big men felt so unsafe in their hotel but were fine sleeping in their cars in parking lots (which never happened) like they also claimed,” she wrote.
“And our set was only 35 minutes from Albuquerque. Santa Fe is an hour from Albuquerque, but the set was 25 minutes south of that. So they aren’t even traveling that far to go home,” she said.
Davis also said safety was not compromised on set. “Our AD never seemed flippant about safety,” she wrote, referring to assistant director Dave Halls, “who reportedly handed Baldwin the pistol that killed Hutchins and insisted that it was a ‘cold gun,’ according to a search warrant,” the New York Post reported.
“Am I angry with him? Yes. But I won’t jump on the bandwagon and pretend he was uncaring about our safety the whole way through,” she said.
Davis also defended the head armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 24. Crew members have said she lacked experience.
“I’ll fight to have our armorers have higher standards they must pass to be in that position where they hold all of our lives in their hands,” the costume designer wrote, according to the Instagram screenshots.
“But I’m not okay with using her to be the poster child for better hours,” she added before ripping the “pitchfork” mob blaming the movie’s producers.
“Maybe you could just not be one more person with a pitchfork in a mob that has no idea what you’re talking about because you weren’t there,” she wrote.