The “inexperienced” armorer in charge of weapons on set of Alec Baldwin’s movie “Rust” had given a gun to an 11-year-old actress without checking properly for safety, a report said.
Hannah Gutierrez Reed, 24, daughter of prominent Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, was head armorer on set in Santa Fe where Baldwin fired a prop gun loaded with a live round, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.
Gutierrez-Reed’s alleged misstep happened on the set of the upcoming Nicholas Cage film, “The Old Way” and temporarily halted filming, sources told The Daily Beast.
“She was reloading the gun on the ground, where there were pebbles and stuff,” one source told the outlet. “We didn’t see her check it, we didn’t know if something got in the barrel or not.”
Gutierrez-Reed reportedly handed the gun to child actress Ryan Kiera Armstrong, forcing concerned crew members to intervene, the report said. The gun was then checked for barrel obstruction, according to the sources.
“She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again,” a source said.
“There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.”
A “Rust” production source described Reed as “inexperienced and green,” to the outlet, adding that there had been two other incidents of accidental discharges by crew members.
Two other “Rust” production sources questioned if Assistant Director Dave Halls followed proper procedure before the tragic incident.
“He’s supposed to be our last line of defense and he failed us,” one source told The Daily Beast. “He’s the last person that’s supposed to look at that firearm.”
Halls was named in the affidavit calling out “cold gun,” indicating its safety before giving the weapon to Baldwin.
Another source confirmed that it should be the assistant director’s job to test each gun for being “hot” — loaded with live rounds, or “cold” — loaded with blank rounds.
“This check alone should’ve prevented this incident,” the person told The Daily Beast.
Last month, Guitierrez- Reed said on a podcast that she was “nervous” about her abilities as an armorer while she was working on “The Old Way” — her first experience as head armorer.
“You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready … but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly,” she said last month on the Voices of the West podcast.
