Is the Embattled Young ‘Rust’ Armorer Getting a Fair Shot?

On Oct. 21, 2021, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then 24, arrived at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an hour or so before sunrise and reported to her job as the armorer and props assistant on the set of the low-budget indie Western Rust. She took a COVID test, swung by the catering tent and headed to the prop truck to prepare weapons the cast would need that day, including Alec Baldwin’s gun, a long Colt .45 revolver, which she loaded with what she has said she thought were dummy rounds.

When first assistant director Dave Halls called for Gutierrez-Reed on a walkie-talkie, she walked to a church set on the edge of the ranch’s mock Western town and approached Halls, seated in a pew with director of photography Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza, conferring about the schedule. That morning, most of the camera crew had walked off in a protest of their working conditions, and the remaining crew were scrambling. “I told him I needed a weapons check, and he said, ‘We don’t have time,’ ” Gutierrez-Reed said of Halls, according to testimony she gave to New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau (OHSB) in December of 2022.

About two hours later, the gun Gutierrez-Reed had stored, cleaned and loaded for Baldwin fired a live bullet into Hutchins’ chest, killing the 42-year-old cinematographer and injuring Souza, who stood beside her. The shooting, a rare and horrifying accident in a film industry that was built on gunslinging imagery, would shine a light on the use of real weapons on sets, the ramifications of low-budget filmmakers’ penny-pinching and the dysfunction of a Santa Fe prosecutor’s office charged with figuring out who exactly is to blame.

For the past two and a half years, the entertainment industry, the wider public and the Hutchins family have been waiting for any sort of justice on Rust. New Mexico’s OHSB has described the cascade of mistakes that led to Hutchins’ death as reflecting the Rust producers’ “plain indifference to the safety of employees” and fined them $100,000. Gutierrez-Reed, one of the youngest and least powerful people working on the movie, is the likeliest person to go to prison for those mistakes. Now 27, she is set to stand trial in Santa Fe on Feb. 21 on charges of involuntary manslaughter and evidence tampering (unless a Hail Mary motion her attorney filed to dismiss the case, scheduled for Feb. 14, succeeds, or she takes a plea deal in the interim). Prosecutors say she was negligent in loading Baldwin’s gun with live ammunition and that she tampered with evidence by asking another person to take possession of narcotics she had on her on the day of the shooting.

Baldwin, who was both star and producer on the film, will go to trial on involuntary manslaughter charges after Gutierrez-Reed. The 30 Rock star has pleaded not guilty; his trial was set for August but postponed after the judge was reassigned. He is represented by high-profile litigators Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel, whose clients have included the likes of Jay-Z and Elon Musk. Halls, who was charged with negligent use of a deadly weapon, took a plea deal and was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. 

Gutierrez-Reed faces up to three years in prison for the manslaughter and evidence tampering charges and an additional 18 months for a separate firearms possession charge the DA added in November. The charge — unlawful possession of a firearm while inside a licensed liquor establishment — is based on a photograph of a gun on Gutierrez-Reed’s cellphone that prosecutors say she took in the bathroom of a Santa Fe bar three weeks before the shooting. The armorer, who is being represented pro bono by Albuquerque attorney Jason Bowles, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has declined a plea deal offer from the DA that would have required her to accept responsibility for bringing the live rounds onto the set. Once an honors student and theater kid who apprenticed with her stepfather, she is now a cautionary tale at the center of one of the film industry’s most tragic mistakes. 

***

Gutierrez-Reed grew up in Bullhead City, Arizona, a desert town mostly home to snowbirding retirees and casino workers, just on the other side of the Colorado River from Laughlin, Nevada. Her stepfather, veteran Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, often was away on film sets but raised Gutierrez-Reed. Her mother, Stacy Reed, who cleaned commercial buildings for a living, named Hannah after a line in the Rolling Stones song “Memory Motel” — “Hannah honey was a peachy kind of girl.” 

In a 2021 interview on the Voices of the West podcast, which she recorded one month before she went to work on Rust, Gutierrez-Reed said of Thell, “My dad’s the bomb dot com. He took me from being completely green. Dad has taught me everything.” A former colleague of Thell’s calls the armorer, who has worked on more than 50 film sets, “the last living gunslinger scoundrel guy.” When Gutierrez-Reed was 11, Thell took her out of school so she could visit him on the New Mexico set of James Mangold’s 2007 Western 3:10 to Yuma. She ran around the location — the same Bonanza Creek Ranch where Rust would film 15 years later — and held up the craft services tent with plastic guns, shouting, “Give me your pistachios!” 

At Mohave High School, where she was in the National Honor Society, Gutierrez-Reed found her tribe among the theater kids. “Our whole life revolved around the fall play and spring musical,” says Sarai Ramnani, a high school friend. “That’s what we did for fun. What else is there to do? It’s Bullhead.” Gutierrez-Reed played Judy, the Natalie Wood role, in their production of Rebel Without a Cause and Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest, and she worked backstage building sets. “I’ve never known high school kids who were so hungry for the arts,” says Lori Garner, Gutierrez-Reed’s high school drama teacher, who worked at Mohave High School for seven of her 37 years of teaching. “I believe it’s because we were in the desert, in a low socioeconomic area. A lot of kids were living with grandparents. A lot of them didn’t have a whole lot. Theater was their family, their home away from home.” Gutierrez-Reed was independent and tenacious, with a good work ethic, according to Garner. “She had a tough facade, but underneath she was a sensitive soul,” Garner says. “She took theater seriously. I know that she had big dreams and goals. She was proud of what we did.”

As Gutierrez-Reed got older, Thell began to teach her about guns and bring her to more of his sets, this time to work instead of play. She was a background actor in 2016’s The Magnificent Seven and a production assistant on Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 best picture nominee, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “My job was just to sight crackheads to keep them out of the shot,” Gutierrez-Reed said on the podcast of her role on the L.A.-set Tarantino film. Ramnani describes Gutierrez-Reed as unusually confident. “She just talks so easily to people,” Ramnani says. “She’s so sure of herself, in a way that I’m in awe of.” That kind of confidence is handy on film sets, where being intimidated by famous actors and directors is a liability. “She had a comfort,” says a source who worked with Gutierrez-Reed. “A ton of set experience specifically with Westerns. She was enthusiastic. She was astute. She was up to it.” 

In 2020, Gutierrez-Reed graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff as a film major. A dean’s list student, she was taking courses in lighting design and cinematography and working on a documentary about a watershed project intended to reduce wildfires in the region. Her hope was to someday be a cinematographer, a field where women, like Hutchins, are rare. “She took every single assignment very seriously,” says Kiril Kirkov, a teaching assistant in the NAU film department who worked with Gutierrez-Reed on the documentary. “She would always deliver on time in a creative way.” 

Although she was thriving academically and beginning to build a career in the film industry, Gutierrez-Reed was experiencing personal tragedy. In 2018 and 2019, while she was in college, her mother was arrested multiple times for disorderly conduct and felony drug possession. (A judge later dismissed the drug possession case — Stacy Reed says that police confiscated a small plastic bag from her glove compartment with a shirt button in it and claimed, incorrectly, that it was drugs.) In August 2020, the summer after Gutierrez-Reed graduated from college, her boyfriend, Tyler Dyer, and a friend left a party on motorcycles. Dyer, who had been drinking, took Gutierrez-Reed’s bike (she remained at the party), lost control and crashed into a wall and died. Because Dyer was on Gutierrez-Reed’s motorcycle, her insurance company agreed to pay his parents $50,000 in exchange for them not suing her. 

After the wreck, Gutierrez-Reed kept riding a motorcycle — she had a Harley she called her “Hardly,” because it hardly runs — and she kept learning more about guns. Thell gave her her own Peacemaker, a Colt revolver popular in the Wild West era, and he invited her to assist him on the indie Western Murder at Yellowstone City.

In August 2021, Gutierrez-Reed got a job on the Montana set of the Nicolas Cage movie The Old Way, the first gig Gutierrez-Reed had landed as an armorer without her dad. “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 on the podcast. That same month, another of Gutierrez-Reed’s close friends was killed, shot by police in Bullhead City.

In the aftermath of the Rust shooting, crewmembers from The Old Way gave differing opinions about Gutierrez-Reed’s competence to reporters. Key grip Stu Brumbaugh told The Wrap that Cage had yelled at her for firing a gun without warning the people around her, and said he himself complained to the assistant director that Gutierrez-Reed was failing to follow basic safety protocols. “She’s a rookie,” Brumbaugh says he told the AD. But The Old Way’s prop master Jeffrey W. Crow, Gutierrez-Reed’s boss, told the Los Angeles Times, “My skepticism of her initially, about her lack of experience, was allayed after I’d worked with her. I thought she was exceptional.” As a female armorer, Gutierrez-Reed was a rarity, and on the set of The Old Way, she said she found that actors with questions about their guns would often go first to Crow. “I’d be like, ‘Don’t look at him, look at me,’ ” Gutierrez-Reed said on the podcast. “I had some issues with men being professional on the last one. It was my first time on set without my dad. There was a little bit of sexual harassment going on. I really thought that was kind of over with after [Harvey] Weinstein.”

After she finished making The Old Way, Gutierrez-Reed began to professionalize her operation. She applied to become a member of IATSE and printed up new business cards that read “No Son of a Gun,” with her picture on them. In the picture, she has white-blond hair, winged eyeliner and an upper lip piercing; she’s wearing black denim, with a brown leather gun belt around her hips, an ammunition belt slung over her shoulder and two revolvers in her hands, crossed over her chest. Of her experience on The Old Way, Gutierrez-Reed told the podcast, “It was a really badass way to start off a really long and cool career, I’m hoping.”

***

The Rust job came to Gutierrez-Reed only after other, more experienced crew people turned producers down. According to a copy of the Rust production budget obtained by THR dated Sept. 9, 2021, the $7.3 million film was originally scheduled to have an armorer supervisor, who would have made $7,913, and an additional armorer crewmember, who would have made $7,469. Before Gutierrez-Reed was hired, producers eliminated the armorer crewmember position and combined the armorer supervisor job with prop assistant, taking what had initially been budgeted as two jobs managing the weapons on the gun-heavy film and compressing it into half a job. Prop master Neal Zoromski told NBC’s Today, “I turned the job opportunity down on Rust because I felt it was completely unsafe.” 

With more experienced crew balking at the level of responsibility, Rust hired Gutierrez-Reed on the recommendation of Seth Kenney, the owner of PDQ Props, the weapons supplier for the film who was a family friend of the Reeds. (Within a year, Gutierrez-Reed would be filing a lawsuit against Kenney, alleging that he provided a mix of dummy rounds and live bullets; she has since dropped the suit, and Kenney is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution in her trial.) On Rust, Gutierrez-Reed would be responsible for the $12,500 worth of rented guns and the $5,000 worth of ammunition the film planned to use, as well as assisting prop master Sarah Zachry on making and transporting props, and tasks like rolling authentically vintage-looking cigarettes for the actors. Zachry, who was Gutierrez-Reed’s boss on the production, signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors in October, agreeing to testify at the trial in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Before production started, Gutierrez-Reed held a training session for the dozen or so actors whose roles called for them to handle guns that Baldwin was not able to attend. “I was very impressed by the training session,” Halls testified to the OSHB. “She made sure that all those actors were holding the gun properly, pulling it out of their holster. They all shot blanks.” Gutierrez-Reed held a private training session for Baldwin at the church. “I walked in, and I said, ‘All right, Alec. I’m going to be your armorer. We’re going to go over how to shoot all your weapons, how to load them, how to make them safe, and we’re going to make sure that you really know — that you look like you know what you’re doing,’ ” Gutierrez-Reed testified to the OSHB. She said that Baldwin spent much of the planned session on his phone texting, FaceTiming his wife and children, and having his assistant shoot video of him with the gun for Instagram. After the session, Gutierrez-Reed said she requested the producers grant her more training time, “Particularly with Alec, just because his role is so gun-heavy, and I wanted to make sure he was familiar with his weapon,” Gutierrez-Reed testified. “I told them that he needed more time to practice his cross draw because I didn’t want him to have complications with it on filming day.” (She didn’t get the time.)

On Oct. 14, Rust line producer Gabrielle Pickle emailed Gutierrez-Reed to chastise her for spending too much time on the movie’s guns. “It has been brought to my attention that you are focusing far more on Armor and not supporting props as needed,” Pickle wrote. In the same email, Pickle said that the “Production and AD team have seen twice that there was a shotgun left unattended after a scene.” Gutierrez-Reed replied that the armorer job was “a very serious job and since we’ve started I’ve had a lot of days where my job should only be to focus on the guns and everyone’s safety. There are working guns on set every day, and those are ultimately going to be a priority because when they are not, that’s when dangerous mistakes can happen.” Gutierrez-Reed asked the production to approve more days where she would be working as the armorer, which paid more per hour than the props assistant. On Oct. 17, Gutierrez-Reed sent a text message to Pickle that said, “Hey, we’re on day 8 of Armor days. So if there’s gunfire after this you may want to talk to the producers.” According to the OHSB report, Pickle replied that there would be “No more trading (sic) days.” Gutierrez-Reed asked to clarify, “Training days?” Pickle responded, “Like training Alec and such.”

Before the day of the shooting, there were signs on the set that Gutierrez-Reed was overwhelmed, including two accidental discharges. She has said that performing both the armorer and props jobs was too much and that producers ignored her concerns. “If I give a safety recommendation, usually I could get … I could get rolled over in some aspects,” she testified to the OHSB. “If I thought I needed more time or something to prepare for a scene, I could be told to hurry up. I could be told, ‘No, we need to do it now.’ ” 

The prosecution will say there’s another reason Gutierrez-Reed wasn’t able to do her job properly: drugs. Prosecutors intend to introduce texts from Gutierrez-Reed’s phone that indicate she was using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during production. On Oct. 17, the night she asked Pickle to approve more armorer days, Gutierrez-Reed was communicating with a driver on the film who asked if she was still up and if he could stay in her hotel room in Santa Fe before getting back to work in the morning. “I’m up, I’ll roll one,” Gutierrez-Reed replied. “I always gotta stay up for a bit when I get back anyways.” The next morning, the worker texted her, “Thanks again. Ur awesome nd gorgeos by the way lol we gotta chill again this week if you wanna I’ll take some drinks bud and maybe some white from Vegas [referring to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine] so you can try it if not no worries I’ll see u at work Wednesday.” Gutierrez-Reed replied to the transportation crewmember, “Awe thanks, that means a lot considering I look like a potato most of the time haha. You pretty cute too, even tho you snore yeah I’m down, I’ll letcha know.” The night before Hutchins died, Gutierrez-Reed texted the driver that “I might go smoke in the jacuzzi soon, but maybe not I’m so pooped,” followed by “Headed down to get high out back :P.”

The day of the shooting was scheduled to be an ambitious one, with animals, special effects, three locations and five guns. “With five guns on the set, Hannah should have had at least one assistant,” says Leni Calas, who has done armory work for shows including Law & Order: SVU, Damages and Boardwalk Empire. “You can’t hold that many guns in two hands.” Inside the church set that afternoon, the makers of Rust made a series of errors that defied film industry safety standards, according to multiple armorers THR has interviewed. Here are just some of them: Hutchins, Souza and any other crew in the church should have been behind bulletproof glass. Gutierrez-Reed, Halls and Baldwin should all have checked the gun. Baldwin should not have pointed the gun at people. Baldwin should not have pulled the trigger (he maintains that he did not, that instead the gun accidentally discharged, an assertion the FBI ballistics lab that tested the gun says is impossible). In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, police officers who responded to the scene interviewed Gutierrez-Reed in a cruiser and asked her what her job was. “I’m the armorer,” Guiterrez-Reed replied, according to bodycam footage of the interview the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office released. “Or at least I was. Welcome to the worst day of my life.” Any one of those mistakes is a sign of a production operating outside of industry norms when it comes to weapons, but what made the errors deadly that day was the live ammunition in Baldwin’s gun. 

Prosecutors will make the case that Gutierrez-Reed was the source of the live ammunition, citing images from the filming and photos from other sources, including Gutierrez-Reed’s phone, that show live rounds present on the set on at least four other days. They’ll say there is evidence the live rounds originated in the same box of dummy rounds that Gutierrez-Reed admitted pulling from on the day of the shooting and acknowledged bringing on set in a follow-up interview with detectives. And they will cite a text message Gutierrez-Reed received from her father Sept. 3, 2021, that suggests she would have had that type of ammunition in her possession before the shooting. “Did you find .45 Colt ammo?” Thell texted. An hour later, he sent a follow-up message: “Keep looking.” 

***

The Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office has made a series of high-profile blunders on Rust. At the top of the list are waiting 15 months to bring a case; downgrading charges against Baldwin, who was incorrectly charged under a version of a state firearm law that wasn’t in place at the time of the shooting; and prematurely indicting Baldwin, only to have to dismiss and refile charges against him less than a year later. Andrea Reeb, the special prosecutor named to the case, stepped down after her appointment was challenged due to a potential conflict of interest. A former district attorney who was a Republican candidate for the state’s House of Representatives, Reeb emailed Santa Fe County District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies suggesting that publicizing her participation in the case “might help in my campaign lol,” according to emails acquired by The New York Times in response to a request under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act. Carmack-Altwies subsequently bowed out alongside Reeb.

“When you start to add all these things up, it paints a picture that they don’t know what they’re doing,” says Joshua Ritter, a former prosecutor with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.

Accusations of misconduct have continued to dog the DA’s office, even after the appointments of new prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis. Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney has argued to dismiss charges against her, alleging in court documents filed last year that prosecutors have tainted the case to the point that she no longer can receive a fair trial and alleging that they “directed a sloppy investigation.”

Although the central question around the shooting was always how the live rounds ever made it onto the set of the Western, law enforcement didn’t search the prop truck where the guns and ammunition were stored until a week after the accident and left the prop cart unattended, according to records from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. Prop master Zachry admitted in an interview with investigators that she disposed of rounds in actor Jensen Ackles’ gun to hide evidence, and those rounds were never recovered.

Seven other live rounds in addition to the one that struck Hutchins were also found on the set, but no fingerprint or DNA analysis was conducted to try and identify who introduced them, per court records. Investigators, in an email responding to Bowles inquiring why such testing was not done, maintained that it “didn’t make sense” given “the fact the items were from movie sets, which had been handled over and over and over.” Such testing is now impossible after the FBI handled all of the rounds and disassembled them in testing.

 Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney argued that key evidence was mishandled when it comes to the firearm, which had its sear (part of the trigger mechanism that holds the hammer on a gun) destroyed in testing. Despite being notified by the FBI that its planned analysis of the weapon might result in damage, prosecutors greenlit the plan without allowing for third-party inspection, according to Bowles in a motion to dismiss the charges against his client.

In June 2023, tensions between the rotating band of prosecutors and the sheriff’s office came to light when Robert Shilling, a former New Mexico State Police chief whom prosecutors had hired as an investigator, departed the case, issuing a blistering critique of the sheriff in an email to prosecutors and cc’ing Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney. “The conduct of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office during and after their initial investigation is reprehensible and unprofessional to a degree I still have no words for,” Shilling wrote, according to court documents filed by Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer. “Not I or 200 more proficient investigators than I can/could clean up the mess delivered to your office in October 2022.” Shilling, who wrote the statement of probable cause supporting charges against Gutierrez-Reed, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Noticeably missing from the prosecution’s crosshairs are the producers of the low-budget Western, outside of Baldwin. They include Ryan Smith and Allen Cheney, who have a checkered history with financial and safety issues on their films, as well as Baldwin’s manager Matt DelPiano and actor Anjul Nigam. In criminal cases involving a shooting, charges are typically limited to whoever took the immediately preceding actions of the crime. Here, that would be Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun, and Baldwin, who pulled the trigger. Prosecutors have pursued a theory of negligence that the parties who handled the weapon didn’t do so in a sufficiently safe way but they did not extend liability to the film’s producers, who operate as Rust Movie Productions. The producers have been accused in several lawsuits of ignoring industrywide norms related to the use of guns on the set of Rust (they have denied liability). It’s likely that neither the company nor its agents will ever face criminal liability for the shooting.

Since the shooting, Halls has retired from the industry. Baldwin and the other Rust producers have continued to work, finishing production on Rust in May 2023 and attempting to sell the film at the Cannes Film Festival (producers have yet to announce a sale). Shortly after the shooting, Hutchins’ widower, Matthew Hutchins, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against producers, but he reached a settlement in October 2022 that provided for insurance funds and a portion of the film’s profits to benefit the couple’s son, Aldous, who was 9 when his mother was killed. In January 2023, when prosecutors first charged Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed, Hutchins’ attorney, Brian Panish, said in a statement, “Our independent investigation also supports charges are warranted. It is a comfort to the family that, in New Mexico, no one is above the law.”

Since Rust, Gutierrez-Reed has been doing social media for a realty company in Arizona to make money and waiting for her trial. “I’ve told her I was praying for her,” says Garner, Gutierrez-Reed’s high school drama teacher. “She told me, ‘I feel like I’m in a poker game and I’ve only got a couple of chips.’ ” 

After the DA’s office published her address and phone number, Gutierrez-Reed began receiving threats, and she now has a restraining order against a stalker. Prosecutors argued that Gutierrez-Reed should have to surrender her firearms ahead of the trial because of her “sloppiness,” but her attorney argued that she should be able to keep the weapons for self-defense. A judge ruled that she could keep the guns.

Frontier Justice: A Timeline

Guilt in the shooting death of Rust DP Halyna Hutchins is a thorny legal issue — complicated by a series of prosecutorial missteps and false starts.

Oct. 6, 2021

Production starts on Rust.

Oct. 21

The shooting occurs. DP Halyna Hutchins is killed.

Feb. 15, 2022 

Hutchins’ widower files a wrongful death lawsuit against producers.

Aug. 3 

Santa Fe DA Mary Carmack-Altwies appoints Republican legislative candidate Andrea Reeb as special prosecutor. 

Oct. 5 

Hutchins’ widower reaches a settlement with producers.

Jan. 19, 2023 

Prosecutor files involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin and Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.

Feb. 9 

Hutchins’ parents and sister, who live in Ukraine, file a lawsuit against Baldwin, Gutierrez-Reed, first AD Dave Halls and the film’s producers.

Feb. 20 

DA dismisses gun enhancement charges against Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed, crimes that would have carried a five-year sentence.’

Feb. 23

Rust producers reach a settlement with the state of New Mexico. They will be fined $100,000.

March 14 

Special prosecutor Reeb steps down from the case, followed March 29 by DA Carmack-Altwies, who appoints New Mexico attorneys Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis as special prosecutors.

April 20 

Charges against Baldwin are dropped as Rust resumes filming.

June 22 

Prosecutors charge Gutierrez-Reed with additional offense, tampering with evidence. 

Jan. 19, 2024 

A grand jury indicts Baldwin on involuntary manslaughter charges.

Feb. 21 

Gutierrez-Reed’s trial is scheduled to begin in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Winston Cho contributed to this report. 

This story first appeared in the Feb. 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.