The sheriff’s office in Santa Fe said nearly a month had elapsed since a search warrant was issued for the phone, but it had not yet been surrendered.
A lawyer for Alec Baldwin said on Thursday that the actor would turn over his cellphone “this week” to authorities investigating his fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set for the film “Rust,” nearly a month after detectives secured a search warrant for the device.
The pledge came hours after the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office — which is investigating the shooting — had released a statement pointedly noting that the warrant had been obtained on Dec. 16 but that “to date, the cellphone has not been turned over to authorities.”
Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer, Aaron Dyer, said in a statement that he and his client had reached an agreement with officials in Santa Fe County last weekend regarding the actor’s phone and that they were finalizing logistics with the authorities in New York, where Mr. Baldwin has a home.
“Ever since this tragic incident, Mr. Baldwin has continued to cooperate with the authorities, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply untrue,” Mr. Dyer said in the statement. “We requested that the authorities obtain a warrant so that we could protect his privacy on other matters unrelated to ‘Rust’ and have been working through that process.”
After media outlets reported last week that investigators did not yet have Mr. Baldwin’s phone, weeks after a judge in New Mexico approved the warrant request, Mr. Baldwin posted a video of himself on Instagram saying he was complying but that the process was taking time. He suggested that he was concerned about maintaining his privacy, saying, “They can’t just go through your phone and take, you know, your photos or your love letters to your wife or what have you.”
Officials in Suffolk County, New York, said last week that they were also involved in facilitating the phone’s transfer to the authorities.
In a television interview last month, Mr. Baldwin fiercely insisted that he was not to blame in the shooting that killed the cinematographer of the film, Halyna Hutchins, and injured the director, Joel Souza. He said that when the gun went off, he had been practicing drawing it from his shoulder holster and that he had not pulled the trigger; he said he had not fully cocked the hammer of the gun, an old-fashioned revolver, but had pulled it back as far as he could and let it go in an action that might have set it off.
Mr. Baldwin said in the TV interview that he did not know how live rounds got on the set of the western, a question at the center of the authorities’ investigation in Santa Fe.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
