The armorer whose job it was to track all of the weapons on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” has now filed a lawsuit saying that the supplier of the guns and ammunition was at fault.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed said that Seth Kenney and his company, PDQ Arm & Prop, had provided the box of ammunition marked “dummy.” She said that box contained at least one live round that was loaded into a prop gun that was given to Baldwin.
The gun went off when Baldwin was practicing with it on set on Oct. 21.
Baldwin said he was holding the gun but did not pull the trigger, The Washington Post reported.
The shot killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza.
In the suit, Gutierrez-Reed said, “Hannah and the entire ‘Rust’ movie crew relied on the defendants’ misrepresentation that they provided only dummy ammunition,” The New York Times reported.
The lawsuit also said that Kenney and his company “distributed boxes of ammunition purporting to contain dummy rounds, but which contained a mix of dummy and live ammunition to the Rust production,” according to the newspaper.
But not all of the ammunition that was on the set of “Rust” came from Kenney.
The props head, Sarah Zachry, told law enforcement some of the ammunition came from a previous production Gutierrez-Reed had worked on as well as a person identified as “Billy Ray.”
Kenney said in December on “Good Morning America” that the live rounds did not come from his company and that “there’s something very unique about the live rounds that were found,” the Post reported.
EXCLUSIVE: The owner of a prop arsenal that provided guns and ammunition to the “Rust” movie set speaks out. @KayleeHartung reports. https://t.co/QRWfr3VCVd pic.twitter.com/w8F4MnH3xi
— Good Morning America (@GMA) December 2, 2021
Thell Reed, the veteran armorer and father to Gutierrez-Reed, said that Kenney had trained actors on how real rounds feel when fired and went to a Texas shooting range. The casings from that event were stamped with “Starline Brass,” Reed said, and that was the mark found on the round that killed Hutchins, USA Today reported.
Kenney did not respond to The New York Times’ request for comment on Gutierrez-Reed’s lawsuit.
Gutierrez-Reed is suing for damages that she said were the result of “false representations” of what happened on the “Rust” set, the Post reported.
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