Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the 26-year-old armorer hired for the tragic production of Rust, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for her involvement in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
The New York Post reports that Gutierrez-Reed sobbed throughout her court hearing as she received the sentencing Monday (April 15), weeks after she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March.
Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer told Gutierrez-Reed during the hearing, “A conditional discharge is not appropriate. The second option — leaving you in the detention center — is giving you a pass you do not deserve … you alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, a husband would have his wife and a little boy would have his mother.”
Hutchins died in October 2021 when she was struck by a live bullet that had been loaded into Alec Baldwin‘s prop gun during a rehearsal for the Western film. Director Joel Souza was also seriously injured when the gun was fired.
Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, provided a victim statement during Gutierrez-Reed’s sentencing, saying in Ukranian, “The day of her death ruined my entire life. It’s heart-wrenching to see her child grow without his mother. On the night [husband] Matt [called to say she died] I was screaming and kept pleading with him. Time does not heal. It is two and a half years past and it gets worse and worse.”
The late cinematographer is survived by her husband, Matthew Hutchins, and their son.
Gutierrez-Reed was the first person to stand trial in connection to Hutchins’ death. Assistant director David Halls was also sentenced to six-months probation for negligent handling of the gun after he failed to check it for live bullets before handing it to Baldwin.
Baldwin, who is set to stand trial in the coming months, faces two counts of involuntary manslaughter. He has maintained that he did not pull the trigger that tragic day on set.
The involuntary manslaughter charges were previously dropped but he was indicted again after forensic testing found that “the trigger had to be pulled or depressed sufficiently to release the fully cocked or retracted hammer of the evidence revolver.”
After prosecutors presented evidence that Gutierrez-Reed brought live bullets to set from her home, her attorney claimed that she was not aware that there were there. He also claimed that Baldwin had “gone off-script” by pointing the gun at the crew. “It was not in the script for Mr Baldwin to point the weapon,” he said, per Variety. “She didn’t know that Mr Baldwin was going to do what he did.”
Prior to her sentencing, prosecutors opposed the possibility of giving Gutierrez-Reed a conditional discharge, pointing to a rather incriminating series of jailhouse phone calls in which she called the jurors “idiots” and “a–holes,” per the New York Post.
The prosecutors said it showed a “complete and total failure to accept responsibility for her actions” on her part.
They also claimed that she said she “wants them to put Alec Baldwin in jail also” and that she would not testify in Baldwin’s trial since he “didn’t show up for her.”
