Rust director testifies that armorer apologized to him after he was shot
Rust director Joel Souza, who was injured in the on-set shooting, testified in the trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on Friday
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Joel Souza, director of Rust, testified in the trial of the film’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on Friday, per Deadline. Souza was injured on set when a gun wielded by star Alec Baldwin went off. The incident with the prop gun, which for reasons still unknown contained a live round, killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins; Souza recalled on the stand seeing Hutchins laid on the ground next to him after the shooting, “and her looking back at me and she had the biggest brown eyes I had ever seen.”
Souza testified that he “didn’t see anybody give” the gun to Baldwin amid the busyness of the set. (First assistant director David Halls, who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge in the incident, testified that Gutierrez-Reed gave Baldwin the gun.) He said he didn’t “ have a clear memory of how long I was standing behind” Hutchins in the moments before the shooting, but “I know I got behind her to try to see on the monitor, and there was an incredibly loud bang, that was not like the half and quarter loads you hear on a set. Those are sort of, they are loud poofs and pops. This was deafening. And it felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to my shoulder. I remember that distinctly, and sort of stumbling back and shouting, I don’t remember exactly what I said.”
The director remembered there being “a lot of panic” after seeing Hutchins laid out and bleeding. “I still just couldn’t figure out what had happened. I thought, ‘Was there something stuck in the barrel that came out?’ But just nothing made sense.”
Per ABC News, Gutierrez-Reed told police in the aftermath of the shooting that she had left the set before the actual shooting due to the film’s COVID-19 protocols; Souza testified that he was unaware of any such protocol, but would have expected her to be present for a shooting scene: “The armorer would be where the gun is.” While he was uncertain if she was there when the gun went off, he testified that he saw her among the gathered crew members after he was injured, and “She looked distraught. And I remember her saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry Joel.’ And I remember somebody just screaming at her and they just ushered her out.”
Souza wanted to be taken to the same hospital as Hutchins, but was told it wasn’t possible. When he arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t believe he’d actually been shot: “It just could not compute for me. I just kept saying, ‘You don’t understand. No, no, no. This is a movie set. That’s not possible….It’s just not possible there’s a live round,” he said. “They eventually grew tired of my protesting about it. They showed me an X-ray of my back and there was a very large bullet in it.”
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We live in a world where even saying “I’m sorry” to someone implies you’re guilty of whatever it is you’re expressing empathy for. And it’s been awhile.
Please clarify. Are you saying that somehow expressions of empathy are being used as legally relevant statements now more than they have in prior decades or something? Is the current sociopolitical/cultural environment somehow more abusive to self-expression in the context of legal matters? I don’t understand what you’re getting at here.
Yeah, isn’t it WEIRD that we associate a phrase with its primary meaning.She was apologizing because she knew she fucked up.
It’s just that that’s literally what “I’m sorry” means in this context. No one would run up to someone who had been shot and say “I’m sorry” as an expression of empathy. They’d say “oh my gosh are you okay can you breathe we’re calling an ambulance just hold on!” In this context, you’d only say “I’m sorry” as an expression of regret or culpability. You’d say “I’m sorry” as an expression of empathy when you’re visiting them later in the hospital.
I think the key piece here is the idea that it could be “regret.” It could be “I regret that I trusted Seth Kenney who supplied the bullets” or “I regret that I did everything right and that wasn’t enough.” A sense of moral responsibility vs legal responsibility isn’t the same. This seems like weak proof.I think there is other evidence that suggests culpability on her part. Saying she was sorry someone got hurt isn’t it.
If this was the only evidence, yeah. But with the other evidence of her not doing her job it looks like immediately she knew she’d done fucked up.
All of which is circumstantial without proof she was the source of the live round.
It’s not circumstantial that it was her job to ensure the safety of the guns on set.
I didn’t say it was strong proof. I didn’t even say it was proof. I said it wasn’t an expression of empathy. However, now that we’re on the subject, I will say that it’s an excited utterance and an admission of your own culpability or responsibility for the shooting. Obviously it’s not enough to reach a legal conclusion as to culpability, but it evinces her personal feeling that she was responsible for making sure the gun was safe, which is one of the questions before the jury–who exactly was responsible here.Also it definitely was not “I regret that I did everything right and that wasn’t enough.” That’s not a reptile-brain level of thought that a person has in the immediate aftermath of someone being shot.Also, when two people are shot and one of them is dead, the armorer did not do everything right. That’s insulting to anyone’s intelligence. Whether that makes her legally culpable or not is a different question, but there is zero arguing that she did everything right.
In 38 states or so, that wouldn’t be true. Most states have laws that expressly prohibit admission of apologies or expressions of sympathy/empathy as evidence of liability. New Mexico is one of the dozen that doesn’t. Federalism, ain’t it great? Wait, no, it’s a damn mess.
This take is completely fucked.
We certainly do when the person who said sorry is claiming they weren’t even there.
one of the first pieces of advice if you get in an accident is to not say you are sorry.
I still have no idea why Gutierrez-Reed didn’t take a plea deal.
I mean, there’s no way her lawyers thought the testimony would be in her favor, right?
Couple possibilities:Plea deal would have meant accepting responsibility for bringing live ammo onto the set. Could open her up to all sorts of civil litigationShe may genuinely believe she’s innocent, or at least not the most guilty/responsible party for what went wrong. I kind of sympathize with her to a point — it sounds like she was expected to do the work of three people and was being pressured to cut corners and move fast. Another commenter remarked she probably was an experienced armorer — but not experienced enough in life to stand her ground on things, walk off the job, or not take the job in the first place.Armor sounds like a pretty specific skill set — and is something she has been training years for. She may feel like this is her one shot clear her name and continue that career, because being found guilty means she’ll never be hired in the business again. Truthfully, if by some miracle she’s found not guilty, I can’t imagine she’ll be allowed to work in the business again either (and why would she want to?)Ultimately though I agree with the sentiment that turning down the plea deal was not a wise decision. I feel sorry for her (though not as sorry as I feel for Hutchins’ spouse/kids), it seems like the person with the least power in this situation will be the one who suffers the greatest repercussions (aside from the obvious, Hutchins and her family). But even if you accept she was bullied into rushing, not given the right resources or authority from producers, and so on and so forth — ultimately she was responsible for that gun, what went into it, and what came out of it. It’s a really hard way to learn that when it comes to firearms there is no room for error, and you have to be willing to risk putting the shoot behind, risk getting yelled at, perhaps even risk your job, if it means avoiding a situation where someone gets killed. Prosecutors are trying to paint her as a wildly irresponsible druggie and I don’t believe that. I believe she wasn an over worked, under paid crew member with little to no power. I certainly don’t think she was a bad or malicious person. But she is a person who fucked up in one of the worst ways you can, who on some level failed a fundamental test of judgement and responsibility, and Hutchins paid the price. Dave Halls (first assistant director) did take a plea deal and was sentenced to six months unsupervised probation. He also left the business. Frankly I think he got off easy and the other producers and folks responsible for the safety and wellbeing of the set as a whole probably won’t be held accountable at all. I don’t know if any of them are guilty of “murder” or even “manslaughter”, and the notion of trying to paint Baldwin as someone who should have known the gun was loaded and was wildly irresponsible in his handling of the weapon sounds like a stretch. But Guiterrez-Reed is guilty of something, and as a producer maybe Baldwin and several other folks are too. But Guiterrez-Reed and Halls will probably be the only ones punished. Guiterrez-Reed will probably get more than she deserves and everyone else will get less, if anything at all.
There is a fair amount of legal precedent for people in these situations being found innocent. Most set shootings don’t end up with charges. Most set deaths have seen those involved walk away without criminal charges.There’s a lot about this trial that could go either way and a lot of it is circumstantial evidence – they have not actually proven or determined the source of the live round. I think it seems likely she was negligent based on what we do know, but the legal standard is higher and the line of questioning about why the Sheriff did not pursue the maker of the bullets farther is relevant to that.
They don’t need to prove the source of the round. They only have to prove that no one between her and Baldwin added a live round to the gun. The armorer is supposed to know the difference between a live round and a dummy round and to make a check to be sure. It doesn’t matter if the supplier of the rounds mismarked them or someone messed with the supply – dummy rounds have clear indicators of their status. If either of those indicators are missing the round is considered live and if either of those indicators are present there cannot be gunpowder in the round. You can bet that every armorer who bought from that supplier went and checked every round they bought and we all would have heard by now if any live rounds had been found. Armorers aren’t going to cover for anyone who would pass that level of risk to them. Producers? Maybe. But armorers? They don’t want to end up in a court room over a death or even an injury. Maybe there would not initially be a big story, but if the supplier suddenly retired, that would be a clue and the story would get out.
The source of the live round does matter and the chain of who handled the gun also matters. She can absolutely make the case that someone else mishandled the gun who wasn’t meant to be handling it and that the supplier mismarked live rounds as dummy rounds (part of her defense team’s assertions) and from a legal standpoint that would give her cover that she did not act negligently. Her lawyers have explicitly brought up the fact that the supplier was not appropriately investigated, that the gun was destroyed by investigators, and she is in the process of suing the owner of the company that supplied the rounds.
I don’t think saying “I’m sorry” proves you were guilty of a crime. To be clear, I think Gutierrez-Reed is culpable based on the evidence that we have. I just don’t think saying “I’m sorry” means anything as proof.I do think Souza’s testimony alluding to his denial that it could not be possible may prove more relevant when looking at Baldwin’s trial. That suggests that he, too, had every reason to think a live round being in the gun was impossible.
Why would the person responsible for gun safety on a set apologize after someone was killed by a gun they were responsible for?
This is expecting logic out of something said in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. That’s exactly why it shouldn’t be proof of anything.
It’s often a human impulse to say “I’m sorry.” People apologize all the time for things they don’t have to say sorry for. In this case, no one is denying that the gun is where the bullet came from. The question is who is responsible for the live round. “I’m sorry” could just as readily mean “I’m sorry that the person who supplied the dummy bullets failed” or “I’m sorry that I did my job and it wasn’t enough.”
This could be a turning point – to understand that even though it is a movie set, every real gun that can be loaded with real bullets is possibly lethal and anyone handling the gun should have a day long course on handling that gun and identifying for themselves the sort of ammunition that is loaded into it. Touch a gun you have not been trained for and off the set; perhaps out of the business.Famously, an actor for Ghostbusters questioned what a 55 gallon drum of shaving cream would do as the script called for him to have that volume dropped on him. The producer set up a stuntman to take a trial run. It smashed the stuntman to the ground and the actor noped out of that plan. What happens on the screen is not real for the audience but what happens when making the film is very real (CGI and visual effects excepted.) Think a gun is loaded with dummy rounds? Walk over to a water trough and pull the trigger on all of them. Takes a few seconds and 100% all clear that they are. Anything goes pop or bang and the gun goes back to the armorer.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who accidentally kill someone, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have to pay for their negligence in some way. I think in this case that they still can’t say where the live round comes from says a lot. She’s in charge of that weapon. That she wasn’t able to point the investigators the right direction to discover that piece of information seems to say it was he fault or she’s protecting someone.
So I do feel bad for her. Anyone who has ever almost fell asleep while driving shouldn’t be able to see themselves as morally superior. Many of us have done things that could have ended up with someone dead. But part of justice is a reminder to people to take care with their responsibilities.