[Steve Carlton]

It is my understanding that:

- HG-R should have locked up the guns instead of leaving them on a cart
- HG-R loaded the live round into the pistol that fired
- HG-R brought live ammunition to the set

Prosecutors zeroed in on a box of rounds from the set.

When investigators arrived at the chaotic scene shortly after the shooting, on Oct. 21, 2021, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed showed a lieutenant from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office a cart where she kept guns and ammunition and drew his attention to a box of ammunition where she said that she had retrieved the rounds she put in Mr. Baldwin’s revolver.

“So here’s the box that I got them out of,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, visibly shaken, told the lieutenant, Tim Benavidez, according to body-camera footage that was shown to the jury.

On the witness stand, Lieutenant Benavidez said that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed had shown him a rectangular white box labeled “45 LONG COLT DUMMIES.” Jurors were shown a photograph of the box that was taken in his patrol vehicle.

Investigators found a live round in that box. It was one of six known to be on the film set, which included the one that killed Ms. Hutchins; two that were discovered on top of the prop cart; one that was in a gun belt assigned to an actor and one in the gun belt assigned to Mr. Baldwin, who was playing a grizzled outlaw in the movie.

In a later police interview that was played for the jury, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said that she had supplied two boxes of dummies to the “Rust” production that had been left over from another production she had worked on. She said that she had taken them from a bag, where they had been kept loose, and checked that they were dummies before putting them into boxes.

When Cpl. Alexandria Hancock, the lead investigator on the case, asked Ms. Gutierrez-Reed during that interview what those boxes looked like, Ms. Gutierrez-Reed showed her a photo on her phone.

“Does this look exactly like the box of dummies that Mr. Benavidez took from the prop cart on Oct. 21, 2021?” Kari T. Morrissey, the lead prosecutor, asked Corporal Hancock at trial, showing the jury the photo that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed had displayed.

“Yes, it looks exactly like it,” she replied.

The prosecution said another photo pointed to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed as the source of the live rounds.

One of the prosecution’s key pieces of evidence was an iPhone photo of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed in which she is holding a gun and has a tray of ammunition sitting on her lap. Sarah Zachry, the head of props on “Rust,” testified that she took the photo on Oct. 10 to ensure they were maintaining continuity on the production with regard to props.

The prosecution argued that at least two rounds visible in the tray on her lap, which have distinctive silver-colored primers, were live rounds. And they said that the fact that the photo was taken on Oct. 10 — two days before the production got more .45-caliber Long Colt dummy rounds from the film’s main supplier, Mr. Kenney — suggested that those live rounds had come from Ms. Gutierrez-Reed.

In her closing arguments, Ms. Morrissey compared the Styrofoam tray of rounds shown on Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lap with a photo of the Styrofoam tray of rounds that was taken out of the box of ammunition that Lieutenant Benavidez retrieved after the shooting. She argued that both photos showed the same tray, and pointed out that one of the rounds — one with a silver primer, which the F.B.I. later determined was a live round — was “in the exact same position” as in the earlier photo.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we call that circumstantial evidence,” she said, after leading the jury through a long series of photographs to make the case. “But that’s a mountain of circumstantial evidence.”

Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lead lawyer, Jason Bowles, told the jury that “you cannot tell a live round from a dummy by a picture.”

And Mr. Bowles said that jurors should not rely on the idea that the rounds found in those ammunition boxes were in the same containers they had been brought to the set in because “these rounds were loaded in and out of these boxes daily.” He said that “there’s reasonable doubt all over the place.”

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict on Wednesday, one of the jurors, Alberto Sanchez, said that the jurors had been convinced that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed had brought the live rounds to the set. “We think she did,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/movies/rust-live-ammunition.html