Shownotes Transcript
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The Alec Baldwin movie, Rust, is actually out. Surprisingly, let me say shockingly, after the shooting death of a beautiful young mom, a cinematographer on the set, Helena Hutchins, they went forward with the movie. Okay. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us.
I almost said the wait is over, but was anyone actually waiting for this movie? It's been almost four years after a gun held by Alec Baldwin, loaded with live ammo, was shot, killing an extremely talented cinematographer, Helena Hutchins, on the set. And now that movie, after so many court actions, has made it to theaters.
I'm not a film critic. The reviews have been mediocre, and the word is it's very hard to watch the movie because all you can think about is Lena Hutchins. You know, a lot of many, many films have been shelved by studios for reasons much less serious than this. But an average movie that resulted in the shooting death of a young mom
will now be in cinemas for everyone to view. What happened?
on that set. Tragedy on the film set of a new Alec Baldwin movie and what police are calling a misfire of a prop gun in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The sheriff's office there has just confirmed it was Baldwin who fired the prop gun that killed a 42-year-old female director of photography, Helena Hutchins. The film's director, Joel Souza, was also hurt.
This incident happened on the set of the Western Rust. Now detectives are investigating what type of projectile discharged from this gun. You were just hearing our friend Christine Johnson with CBS. What really happened?
According to reports, the assistant yelled out cold gun just before the shooting, which means the gun was safe, that it was loaded with a blank. So how do we have a woman dead, another film person injured? With me, an all-star panel to make sense of it all, if we can, with me, Dominic Romano, lawyer joining us afterwards.
out of New York at RomanoLaw.com is specialty entertainment law and I can tell you somebody's going to need a lawyer. Dr. Sherry Schwartz, forensic psychologist joining us. Karen L. Smith, forensic expert, host of Shattered Souls podcast at BareBonesForensics.com. Paul
joining us special guest, former police commander and author of Stop Him From Killing Them on Amazon. And he has lots of experience using firearms with blanks during live action movie scenes like Terminator, Salvation, Dr. Michelle Dupree, forensic pathologist, former medical examiner,
author of Homicide Investigation Field Guide and a former police detective. But first to Alexis Tereschuk, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter joining us from Hollywood. Alexis, what is getting folded into the story, right or wrong, is Alec Baldwin's history.
His reputation for, let me just say, hot-headedness, to put it euphemistically. If he thought it was a blank and it should have been a blank, then history aside, it was an accident. But how can it really be an accident when somebody loaded a
This prop gun with real bullets. You know what? Just start at the beginning. They were on a set in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's a Western style movie. So they were sitting in a church, an old church scene. And Alex Baldwin was sitting in one of the pews and he was practicing what's called a cross draw. And so that would be where the person takes your left hand and grabs the gun out of the holster on your left.
the opposite hip, pulled it across to fire. He was practicing this move, standing the cinematographer, which is the person that makes the movie beautiful. This is the person that, that, that direct, that films the scene. She was standing in front of him with the assistant director, I'm sorry, with the director standing right behind her. He was looking over her shoulder to see what it would look like when Alex pulled the gun out. He pulls it out of the side,
Hush is pronounced dead at an Albuquerque hospital after being rushed to the hospital.
to the emergency room. You know what? I always love playing 911 calls for a jury because it takes you back to what's really happening. Not a description, not someone recounting what happened, but you're hearing what really happened. Take a listen to the beginning of that 911 call.
Clear the road.
- Don't hang up, okay? Hold on just one second.
Now you hear repeatedly the word accident, accidentally throughout that. But is it an accident? Very often when you have, for instance, a DUI crash,
People go, well, it was an accident. But was it? Because the driver chooses to go to a bar to order drinks, to drink, to become legally intoxicated, to then get the car keys, walk to the car, get in the car, crank up, reverse, and drive out onto the roads. That sounds pretty deliberate, right?
So, is it an accident? Is it gross negligence? Well, take a listen to more of that 911 call. Okay.
he put the chest and guns he's responsible for the danger no no no i'm a script supervisor how many people were injured two that i know of i was sitting we were rehearsing and it went off and i ran out we all ran out they were doubled over the ad and the camera woman and the director and the director we're clearing the road for you to come back we're back on the way we're back in the town if you call me we're back in the western town
I'm hearing a lot of discussion in the background. You hear the speaker talking to somebody else about someone yelling at her and Lutch about script revision.
And she says she's supposed to check the gun. He's responsible for what happened. No, no, I'm a script supervisor.
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The late arrival of the movie Rust is...
the capstone of a horrible, horrible fact scenario. There was an outpouring of grief when Helena Hutchins was shot dead, leaving behind a little boy and now a widower. Then came years of trials against Baldwin and the armorer responsible for the weapons and the props on the set, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed,
It resulted in Gutierrez-Reed getting a slap on the wrist 18 months behind bars and Alec Baldwin's case being thrown out of court. Wow. Just When You Think It's Over, the movie, is featured on 100 screens around the country. What happened to Helena Hutchins?
Paul Zyke, thank you for being with us. What went wrong? Obviously, there was a live bullet in what should have been a prop gun, but what happened? Nancy, the only explanation for this is a systemic breakdown in systems that are in place to ensure that live ammunition is not present on the set. Okay, now that was a lot of words, Paul Zyke. I think you're saying somebody didn't do their job properly.
Okay, hold on right there. I want to make that distinction. You're absolutely right. Look, I'm a trial lawyer.
I'm a legal expert. You're the expert in this world. When I say prop gun, I mean they're using it as a prop. But...
You're making a very fine, subtle, but important distinction. A prop gun is a fake gun. I don't think it even can shoot. Is that right? Exactly. You're talking about, say, a prop knife, correct? It has a flat edge on it. It's incapable of cutting you. These are things that are not deemed to be dangerous. A prop gun is simply, as utilized on set, are weapons that are capable of firing live ammunition. And therefore...
accidentally live ammunition could be mixed with blank rounds. You know, given time, this is just a disaster waiting to happen. They need to move to true guns that are incapable of chambering live ammunition. Until that happens, this has a very strong chance of repeating itself.
Well, OK, tell me this, Paul Zeit. Guys with me, Paul Zeit. He is a former police commander. He's an author, screen actors, Gil, and has experience using blanks during live action movie scenes where we all think they're shooting real guns. If you suspend your disbelief in movies like his Terminator Salvation, you know,
Those aren't real guns, so why are they using a real gun to start with, Paul Zyke? And I mean, to me, having been forced to handle so many guns and so many homicides, what moron wouldn't make sure that there were blanks in the gun? It's hard to imagine that...
during the loading of the weapon that that was not viewed very strictly as a weapon is loaded. And also there's a chain of custody issue here. On the scene of Terminator Salvation, as we would go out and we would conduct a battle scene, if you will, in the middle of the night, we would be handed...
directly from the armor, fully automatic weapons and magazines fully loaded with blanks. And we would head straight out to where the scene was to be shot. And then we would engage in the scene, you know, five, 10 minutes later, hand the weapon straight back to the armor, all the ammunition back to the armor automatically.
all the magazines back to the armor and we would not be able to touch those weapons again until the next scene. So from a chain of custody standpoint, it went directly from the armor directly to my hand, my, you know, the co-actors hands that were with me. And that was maintained very strictly. Hold on Paul.
I've got to soak in everything you're saying because Dominic Romano, a high-profile lawyer joining us out of New York is specialty entertainment law. That's why Dominic's joining us today. Dominic, hold on. When you heard Paul Zykes say chain of custody, I immediately thought of a serial murderer that I prosecuted on one murder. We could get him on one.
And there ended up, I would say three weeks before trial, I was just looking at the evidence and I noticed that the bag that contained the evidence wasn't signed. It had never been signed by the homicide cop that picked it up.
from, there was DNA in there, it was blood, from where it had been taken and carried to the crime lab. It wasn't written on the back. Did anybody tamper with it? No. He just didn't put his initials. I'm like, oh dear Lord in heaven, the chain is broken. This could be attacked at trial.
I had to go back out to the jail, stand there and look at this killer while he pulled his blood again. Then I carried it with my investigator, myself, back to the crime lab to have it retested. Praise the Lord in heaven, it was his DNA. Long story short, that's chain of custody. Your case can be lost. You can lose a serial killer because somebody didn't keep the chain.
to preserve the integrity of the trial. That's what I thought when Paul Zyke said chain of custody. But did you also hear him say, Dominic Romano, he handed it back to the, it sounded like he was saying armor or armory, but I've been reading about this case. It's an armorer, armorer, who is the person in charge of all the weapons. I think Paul is absolutely right. Look,
No one should ever be killed by a gun on a film set. Period.
Those are the words of Brandon Lee's sister. Brandon Lee shot on a film set in the early 1990s. This should not happen. There are established protocols, chains of command. I mean, there appears to be some serious gross negligence on that set to allow that to happen. That is the appearance. And I don't know what evidence can come out to rebut that presumption.
A live round in, well, as Paul Zyke has corrected me, it's not a prop gun. They were using real guns. Hey, let me ask you a question, Paul Zyke. Explain the difference in what a blank looks like as opposed to a live round, a bullet. When we're saying live rounds, we're talking about a bullet, right?
What's the difference? Can't you just look at them and you can see the difference? In most cases, absolutely. It's very clear you can see the difference. In some types of calibers, say .223, if you will, that's what an AR-15 would shoot, the blanks are...
are kind of crimped at the end to almost look like there's a bullet on the end of them. But any sort of trained professional whatsoever, when you're handling a blank, you know it's a blank. When it's a bullet, you know it's a bullet. The blank does not have a lead projectile or a steel projectile at the end of the round. So at the end, it's either flat or it's slightly crimped to hold in the gunpowder, which is
Okay, Paul Zyke, I really respect you, but you're going to have to dummy down for me, okay? Because I would have to put you through intensive training before you took the stand, because
because a lot of people do not know what you just said. Just think about it and think if there's a way you can say it in more simple terms. What's the difference between a blank and a live bullet when you look at it? Speak English, man. In the meantime, wait a minute. You mentioned Brandon Lee, and you're absolutely right. We pulled Sam.
of other cases almost identical to this. This is not the first time it's happened, believe it or not. Tyler, could you roll our cut 44? Let's follow up on what Paul Zyke said about Brandon Lee. Here comes a bullet that killed Brandon Lee. Some believe a piece of a prop bullet without gunpowder in it may have been left accidentally in the gun. When the blank was fired at Brandon, some feel it shot out the prop bullet, mortally wounding him. The movie was an accident waiting to happen.
The Crow crew member we spoke with says that there were many opportunities for an accident to happen. Are the working conditions on the set of The Crow particularly bad? Extremely long hours, 18-hour days back-to-back at times, pushing 90 to 100 hours a week in six-day weeks is way too much. Do you think that that...
Over work that exhaustion might have resulted in this accident? Safety precautions, all of them were definitely not followed. It could have been prevented.
with better management. The publicist for the movie The Crow denies that the working conditions were unsafe. Certainly everyone was very tired and exhausted from the shoot, but these are professionals, and they're used to working conditions like this. Okay, guys, you are hearing our friends at Inside Edition, and I want to follow up on what we're just hearing with Alexis Tereszczuk. I played that sound for a reason, Alexis, because on the Alec Baldwin set of Rust,
There apparently were problems with working conditions. A group of the crew had walked out, I think, the night before, claiming that they had bad hotels. They were an hour away from a hotel or motel. And if they worked late into the night, they'd have to drive through, I guess, the desert. And a lot of them were actually sleeping in their cars overnight. That's just some of the complaints I've heard.
heard but what are the other complaints if any on the Alec Baldwin movie set well there have been complaints that things were not safe quote but
But one of the person that is being directly blamed for a lot of the unfaith is when you were listening to the 911 call and you said you heard the woman saying that he was yelling at me, things like that. This is the assistant director that they're talking about. And this is the assistant director, David Hall, who handed the gun to Baldwin and said, this is a cold gun. So what the people on the set were saying is that Hall's was not.
He was very angry. He was making the job very difficult for everybody to do, and they didn't trust him. Wait a minute. You're saying David Halls was an assistant director? Yes. Okay, well, what about the armorer? Isn't she the one responsible for all the weapons and the blanks or the bullets? Guys, take another listen to our cut, 43. This is about practically the same thing happening before. Listen. Listen.
It was here at the Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina that actor Brandon Lee was filming The Crow. Ironically, the film is about a man who dies and comes back to life to avenge his death. Shortly after midnight last Tuesday, Brandon Lee was preparing to film a routine action scene. The script called for him to get shot at as he walked through a door carrying a bag of groceries.
Michael Massey, the actor doing the shooting, is reportedly devastated by Lee's death and remains in seclusion. The gun he was using was supposed to be loaded with blanks. When the cameras rolled, Brandon Lee was performing for the last time. Not only can you drive to a theater and see Rust, you can pay about $15 for an at-home purchase. Okay.
Would you want to? We're in, Karen Smith. Well, we deal a lot with forensics and physics when we do a reconstruction. We use snippets of time, and sometimes that can be split seconds, and this includes trajectories of projectiles. And this trajectory can generally be explained by the reporting. Alec Baldwin was reported to be sitting at a church pew to align a camera angle when the gun was fired.
Alina Hutchins then collapsed on the floor and Joel Souza was struck in the clavicle. That's an upward trajectory, which means both Hutchins and Souza were standing up when the event occurred. The projectile.
That perforated Helena's body and subsequently struck Joel. Now, in order for that to happen, the kinetic energy, which is energy as the result of motion, would be very high. We're dealing with mass, or the amount of matter in an object, and energy dispersion. Guns carry a high volume of energy in a small space, and
And that, from my experience, it tells me that it was something other than just the paper or plastic wadding from a blank round. That needs to be confirmed by the ME and the investigators. But there are reports of live ammunition, bullets, being on the set, and that particular gun allegedly being used for target practice that morning.
There's a lot of questions that need to be answered by the investigators and the ME. A gun for the set being used as target practice? Paul Zyke, that shouldn't be. That you've got crew members out shooting bottles, I think that that's coming out, with live bullets and use that same gun? No.
for a scene and a church full of people? And Nancy, I just want to clarify the prior point. So very simply, a blank is a shell casing with gunpowder in it with no bullet. A bullet is the same exact thing with more gunpowder and a live bullet
at the end of it that is made to travel through the barrel and exit the weapon. But back to what you were saying, that's a cardinal rule that's been broken. Whether you're involved in police training or you're involved in a movie set, keeping live ammunition away from weapons that fire live ammunition and keeping weapons that fire blanks away from those instances. And when you mix those two together, the odds...
the odds of somebody having a spare live round in one of their pockets or you name it is super high and it sounds very sloppy and it just opens the door for terrible things to happen and that's where the systemic breakdown and that controlled environment. I'm telling you Paul Zyke you're right super sloppy is one way to put it gross negligence
unintentional murder is another way to put it. I think I hear Dominic Romano jumping in. Go ahead. Basically, it's a catastrophic miscalculation. I think two people here should be focused on. One is...
Okay, that's not good. Whoa, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait. You got me drinking from the fire hydrant, which is not a bad thing. It's too much at once. Hold on. Why in the world...
or would you have somebody that was fired off another similar job handling your weapon? Okay, is that what you just said, Dominic? Okay, almost. Almost. So the armorer
It's 24 years old. The person handling the weapons, it's only her second film. She was just in a podcast last month where she said, you know, she's a bit nervous about her film, but it went well. Her father is apparently a famous armorer. Okay, so we have that, an inexperienced armorer. Number two, we have the assistant director, known as the AD, Dave Hulse.
Apparently, according to a report, he was fired from a 2019 production. The movie was Freedom Path after a crew member suffered. Guess what? A minor injury when a gun unexpectedly discharged. Dominic Romano, the words similar transactions are jumping to mind. I mean, this this solidifies my thought that this is not an accident because.
An accident is when you totally don't see it coming. It's just like out of the blue. But if this guy, if it's correct, the AD had a previous incident where somebody was shot on a set, even if it was a minor injury, then you should have seen, you either knew or should have known. Would you agree with that, Dominic Romano? There are going to be some serious incidents
to be asked and there have to be answers. And if we don't have good answers, someone is either going to be involved in a very expensive lawsuit or depending on what they knew and when they knew it and how careless they were, probably facing some time. The other issue you alluded to earlier is
you know, cost cutting. It's rampant in the industry right now. And the production company's decision not to book the crew
So this is a combination of what turned out to be a lethal combination, a catastrophic capital
on the part of the production company. Well, you just said a mouthful all in a good way between the armorer being inexperienced, the AD having a prior similar transaction, and budget cuts, problems amongst the crew. Take a listen to our cut six from our friends at NewsNation now. Let's start
the people responsible for handling a gun there are no ubiquitous rules across all film sets but generally there are some guidelines that they follow adhering to a budget budget usually plays a big role on many sets there are no fewer than three people responsible for monitoring a weapon prop master who's in charge of all props is often supported by a safety officer and a stunt coordinator
And depending on the state, you may also need to bring in an armorer whose only job is handling weapons. An armorer is required by New Mexico state law.
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overpowers anything that might be good about the movie. What happened? What really happened that day on the set of Rust? Dr. Dupree, I'm sure you, like myself, have had to handle weapons in front of juries. And I learned this from watching a pro try cases. I would always pick the gun up, holding it,
face down with a barrel pointing to the ground so the jury or anyone else would not be alarmed. What you don't want to do is scare your jury. I would walk in front of the jury holding the weapon, nose down, open the chamber, let them see me check it, hold it up like I was examining it at my eye level so they could see that it was empty and then shut it
And then give it to the witness without fail. Even if it was a weapon that I knew was inoperable, that was S O P. Why, why would that happen?
not occur on a movie set, but describe how you're supposed to handle weapons. Exactly, Nancy. You described it perfectly. That is exactly what you should do. And if you're giving a weapon to someone else, normally you have the chamber open so that they can also see. And then you both check it and know that it's empty or that the blanks are in it. Tell me what you can discern about what Karen Smith, forensics expert, just told us about the injuries.
Nancy, even though these are, quote, prop guns or blanks, they can still obviously do devastating damage. The wadding or whatever they are filled with, even in a blank. But this was not a blank. This was an actual projectile. And as we know... You mean a bullet? Speak English, please. A bullet. Yes. Yes, this was a bullet. And the casualty...
You know, another issue to Dr. Sherry Schwartz, I've been on a lot of TV sets, obviously, and movie sets for years.
you know, cameos or some legal issue. And I got to tell you, Dr. Sherry Swartz, it,
A movie set takes on a whole, it's like you're in a different world. Like when you go to the movies and you sit down and it goes dark, your mind takes you there. When you're on a movie set, I've never been on a single movie set that went on time. You go till one or two o'clock in the morning. It's pitch dark outside. You keep going until you get the shot or you finish the scene or whatever it's called in movie world.
I think that there is a suspended fear. You think you're at a movie set, like when you go to Disneyland or when you're on vacation on a cruise ship, you suspend your normal thinking. It doesn't seem real. And you're not thinking, wow, there's a gun. I could get shot because it's, quote, just a movie. It's not real.
How do we, let me just say, suspend our disbelief, suspend rational rules of functioning when you're on a movie set or in a movie, you know, like in movies where there's some nut with a gun.
And you hear a sound, but you don't think it's real because you're in a movie. What happens in the human mind, Dr. Sherry? Well, when you don't think that something is actually real, then you would not calculate accurately what the potential risks are. Right. And so there is this gun on the set, but everybody thinks, oh, it's just make believe we're setting this up to film it.
Nobody's actually going to get hurt. And so what happens mentally is that you underestimate what the potential risks are. And what happened here is an egregious underestimation, right? So for the rest of us, it's make-believe. Maybe even for the actor, they know that they're just playing a role and everybody around them might know they're playing a role. But there are people...
on the set who are responsible for that gun and for taking that proper care and knowing what the potential risks are.
Back to you, Alexis Teresha, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. You have heard Dominic Romano, Paul Zeit, well, everyone on the panel weighing in, but apparently there were a lot of problems and a lot of disgruntled crew members. I understand that one of the motels they had set them up to stay overnight was at a place for the homeless, and there were drug addicts there, and they were afraid to stay there.
What was going on on the set? Well, it seems like what they were trying to do was make this film as cheaply as possible. Understandable. But they were putting people's lives at risk. These hotels were 50 miles away. So after working 14-hour days, the crew was having to drive.
over an hour to get to their hotel. Then they would have to be back within like six hours, so they would get almost no sleep at all. They were also saying that things were just not safe. There had been an incident a few days earlier that one of the prop guns, again, prop gun, real gun, had been accidentally fired. And so the crew had been complaining to the producer saying, this is not a safe working environment. And they walked away.
off the set. And so Hollywood is very much a union business. But the producers hired non-union people to replace them. These non-union people, though, are not the people. It's not the armorer and it's not the assistant director. And everybody's been talking. There is a line of
You have so many steps in the line of defense so that when this gun got to Alex Baldwin, at least two other people were responsible for saying that it wasn't loaded. I mean, didn't somebody even scream out cold gun? I mean, they have to yell it out. You know what you were just saying? I know so many times for different shoots.
I don't know who he is that carries that comes over and they have to do it a certain way. They have to say a certain thing and they say it really loudly. I don't know why, but I'm sure there's a reason for it. Just like they would yell out cold gun and everybody would hear it. But I guess they yelled it out without checking, Alexis. And there are reports that, yes, so there were three guns that were set up.
And they were put on a table outside the church set. And this is because of COVID-19 protocols. So not a lot of people are in the, if it's an enclosed set, they're not there. Three guns. So the assistant director picked it up, Dave Hall, as the other guest said, you know, has a history of a lot of accidents on sets, and handed it to Baldwin. And he is the one that yelled out, cold gun. There's no, nobody has said, so many people have spoken to the police about
on the set, so many of the other crew members. And they said they didn't know whether it actually was empty or not. And these guns were used at lunch. This is a post-lunch break. So they broke for lunch at 1230. They come back after lunch.
During that lunchtime, there were reports that the crew members were using this gun and other guns to shoot beer bottles out in the desert area and using it as target practice. So there could have been a live. And they said there was lots of live ammunition. Nobody was told they couldn't bring live ammunition on set. That's another thing that... Why do you need a live round on set? That's the big problem here. Is that Paul? Jump in. Yeah, I'd like to jump in there. It's...
It's simply a breakdown of the security of the scene. The only people there that are armed should be security personnel. And, you know, in my years, my decade of fighting to keep workplaces safe and to stop stalking offenders from killing victims,
I can tell you one thing, and that is nobody thinks the unthinkable is going to happen. It's a matter of just human thinking. They think that, well, that happened to somebody else. It didn't happen to me. And because this is somewhat of a rare occurrence on set, people got laxed.
They got lackadaisical about fundamental when it comes to shooting a scene such as this. And just like at any workplace, this is a workplace out in the middle of the desert, just like it would be in an office building. Those protocols broke down and people at work attempting to do the right thing for the right reasons had a catastrophic, devastating thing happen because people
We as human beings think, well, if it hasn't happened, it won't happen. And that's just not the reality of life when it comes to dangerous events. The movie Rust, now in cinemas across the country, many legal eagles still scratching their heads over why a judge threw out Alec Baldwin's case. Nancy Grace, signing off.
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