Adan Mendoza

Newly released evidence shows the leads investigators pursued as they try to learn how a live round got into Alec Baldwin’s gun, which fired, killing the film’s cinematographer.Six months after Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” while practicing with a gun that had been improperly loaded with live ammunition, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Tuesday that “I don’t think anybody is off the hook when it comes to criminal charges.”Live ammunition is not supposed to be used on film sets. In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Sheriff Mendoza said that no one had admitted to bringing live rounds onto the set of “Rust,” but indicated that he was concerned by evidence suggesting that a member of its crew had expressed interest in using live ammunition while working on a previous film.“There was information from text messages that was concerning, based on the fact that live ammo was spoke about and was possibly used on a prior movie set,” Sheriff Mendoza said in the interview, “and that was just a few months before the ‘Rust’ movie set and production began.”He appeared to be referring to text messages from the “Rust” armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was responsible for gun safety on the set, in which she indicated that she had expressed interest in shooting “actual ammunition” last summer when she was working on a Nicolas Cage Western called “The Old Way,” which was filmed in Montana.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed texted Seth Kenney, who provides weapons and ammunition for film productions, in August and asked him whether she could “shoot hot rounds,” according to a summary of the text exchange released this week by investigators.Mr. Kenney texted her back, asking what she meant by “hot round.”“Like a pretty big load of actual ammunition,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied.Mr. Kenney told her to never shoot live ammunition out of guns being used on a film set, texting, “It’s a serious mistake, always ends in tears.”“Good to know,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied, according to the case report. “I’m still gonna shoot mine tho.”The summary of the text exchange was included in a tranche of evidence and investigative reports that was released Monday by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. The documents indicated some of the threads that detectives have been following as they try to determine how live ammunition got into the gun Mr. Baldwin was practicing with on Oct. 21 when it discharged, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office released silent footage of Alec Baldwin practicing a scene with a revolver on the set of the Western before accidentally shooting and killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The newly released evidence paints a picture of a sometimes chaotic film set, where some crew members had expressed concerns about gun safety and, after Ms. Hutchins’s death, some crew members disparaged others in texts and to investigators.The sheriff’s office said on Monday that it is waiting on several key pieces of evidence that it needs to complete its investigation.Jason Bowles, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, said in an email that his client’s text messages indicated that she had been asking Mr. Kenney, then a mentor, when she could fire rounds “through a historical weapon to see how it functioned.” He said that she never intended to fire it during production or while on the set.“Hannah has never brought live rounds to any movie set nor has she ever fired them on set,” Mr. Bowles said in the email.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was 24 and had been working as an armorer for less than a year when she took the “Rust” job, her second as an armorer. The daughter of a well-known Hollywood armorer named Thell Reed, she told detectives that she had been “handling guns her whole life.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s discussion of live ammunition on the Montana film set is not the only thread investigators have been following.Around the same time that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was on the set of “The Old Way,” her father and Mr. Kenney were in Texas training actors in the Paramount+ Western series “1883,” according to notes from a detective’s interview with Mr. Reed from November. Part of Mr. Reed’s job was training actors with live ammunition in an area away from the set, and he told a detective that the rest of his ammunition ended up being left with Mr. Kenney.One of the questions investigators have focused on is where the ammunition used on “Rust” came from. Mr. Kenney supplied “Rust” with ammunition and about 30 guns, and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed sued Mr. Kenney and his company earlier this year, alleging that the company had in fact supplied the movie with a mixture of dummy rounds and live ammunition.Understand What Happened on the Set of ‘Rust’Card 1 of 6A fatal shooting. More