Alec Baldwin may have fired the shot that killed “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins without pulling the gun’s trigger, a New Mexico prosecutor says.
Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies told Vanity Fair she had watched Alec Baldwin’s bombshell interview with ABC in December and was drawn to the actor’s claim that he did not pull the trigger.
“You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it,” Carmack-Altwies said. “So you pull it back partway, it doesn’t lock, and then if you let it go, the firing pin can hit the primer of the bullet.”
Baldwin had insisted in the interview that the trigger was never pulled.
“I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them, never,” the former “30 Rock” star said.
Carmack-Altwies launched an unofficial investigation of her own to test Baldwin’s claims that he had only pulled back the hammer of the gun before it went off, firing the live bullet that fatally struck Hutchins in the chest and wounded the film’s director Joel Souza, who was hit in the clavicle.
“I didn’t know too much about guns, certainly not about 1850s-era revolvers. So when I first heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ ” she told Vanity Fair.
The DA requested that one of her investigators bring his old-style revolver to her office to test if a mechanical malfunction could have caused the gun to go off. They cleared a room, and she had two investigators inspect the gun to confirm it was not loaded.
Her test revealed that the hammer could have caused the live round to fire, however official results from an FBI analysis of the weapon are still pending.
While Baldwin said he did not pull the trigger, a lawsuit filed by a “Rust” script supervisor in November alleges that he “intentionally” fired the gun at Hutchins.
Lawyers for Halyna Hutchins’ family filed a wrongful-death suit against actor Alec Baldwin on Tuesday.
Baldwin responded with an Instagram post that simply included an image of an art installment from the Parrish Art Museum that says: “Everything is going to be alright.”