Those attending the Alec Baldwin trial in New Mexico were transported Wednesday to the final minutes of the life of 42-year-old photographer Halyna Hutchins. Prosecutors in the case presented on the first day of the trial the video captured by the first police officer from the city of Santa Fe (State of New Mexico) who responded to the Bonanza Creek ranch, where the western was being filmed. Rust, in October 2021. The reproduction of the images captured by the camera, worn on the officer’s vest, made those present relive the dramatic moments. Five people were kneeling in front of a pair of bodies receiving medical assistance. Screams of pain could be heard inside a wooden church, where filming was taking place. The woman on the floor was alive, but weak. The unthinkable had happened. A real bullet had arrived on a set to break the magic of cinema.
The footage caused many in the room to gasp and shake their heads at the tense scene, in which police officer Nicholas Lefleur called for a helicopter to rush Hutchins to a hospital. Baldwin appears 14 minutes into the footage. He appears calm and cooperative. Moments later he asks a member of the crew to bring him a cigarette to calm his nerves. Officer Lefleur stays by his side, as from that moment on the famous Hollywood actor becomes a suspect. “He told me he had the gun, and someone from the crew told me Mr. Baldwin pulled the trigger,” said the officer, who was at the crime scene for about ten hours.
On Wednesday, in the first session of his trial for involuntary manslaughter, Baldwin, 66, stared blankly as everyone around him followed the drama inside the set. Among them was his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, and his younger brother, the actor Stephen. Baldwin’s body language only changed noticeably during the opening statements of one of the prosecutors, Erlinda Johnson. “One of the problems that afternoon was that the defendant did not respect safety protocols. He pointed the gun at another human being, pulled the hammer of the gun and pulled the trigger in complete disregard of basic safety rules,” Johnson said. The defendant tried to turn away in a gesture of discomfort and, at times, covered his face with his hand. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to 18 months in prison.
The second witness called this afternoon was Timoteo Benavídez, a lieutenant in the office of the sheriff of Santa Fe, who has since retired. The officer was the first to locate Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armory manager, at the scene of the incident. It was she who was holding the .45-caliber Colt revolver. The firearm was presented in court with ceremonious silence. A police officer handed a sealed box to Benavidez, who identified the pistol as the same one that was given to her on October 21. The lieutenant also admitted that Gutierrez-Reed, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison a few months ago for this same case, gave him two boxes of bullets that had been used that day.
Body camera footage from Benavidez shows the gunsmith, then 24, breaking down as police are present. Gutierrez-Reed breaks down in tears as the officer secures the props, which were strewn about on a cart controlled by the gunsmith. Baldwin’s defense team noted that the footage captured by Benavidez shows the security people on the set who were supposed to be guarding the gun. These were David Halls, the assistant director, and Gutierrez-Reed herself.
Alex Spiro, one of the two prestigious New York lawyers who are defending Baldwin, has stressed the accidental nature of the tragedy. “You will hear that the prosecutors will say that he pulled the trigger of the gun (…) Even if he did it intentionally, that does not make him guilty of murder because there was no reason to know that there was a real bullet inside the gun. On a movie set, actors are allowed to pull the trigger, they are acting,” said the lawyer.
The defense played for the courtroom the scene that the production was preparing that day. In it, Baldwin’s character, Harland Rust, a veteran outlaw who comes to the aid of his grandson, who was wrongly sentenced to be hanged, enters an abandoned church wounded. He sits down on a bench and moments later two men enter to look for him. On the other side of the camera, director Joel Souza and director of photography Halyna Hutchins captured Rust’s reaction, who quickly draws his revolver with his left hand. In the video, the actor can be heard asking the filmmakers if he is doing it right or if he should do it faster. It is in one of these movements that the gun goes off.
Spiro has appealed to the magic of cinema and the idolatry of weapons that the western genre has to contextualize the tragedy. “Consider a theatrical element, in cinema and television since the earliest times, the displays of war and combat. [La película] Spartacus shocked audiences by seeming real. After Apocalypse Now “It showed the reality of war without any make-up. This ranch in Santa Fe was the scene of violent shootings before Alec Baldwin was born. Guns are in movies because they are in people’s lives,” the lawyer justified in his opening argument. The trial will continue until Friday, July 19.
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