The now infamous shooting death on the set of Rust has the appearance of a horrific freak accident: A real bullet somehow makes its way onto the set of the Western drama and through a cascade of missteps, Alec Baldwin fires it from his gun during a rehearsal, tragically ending a life and upending countless others. But a 551-page sheriff’s report includes a revelation that makes the October 2021 shooting seem less like impossible bad luck and more like an inevitability: FBI testing uncovered a total of five live rounds of ammunition among the movie’s prop weapons—six if you count the bullet that actually went off, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding writer-director Joel Souza.
The actor’s public claim “I didn’t pull the trigger” was also contradicted by the FBI analysis of the vintage Colt handgun that fired the fatal shot. “With the hammer at full cock, the revolver could not be made to fire without a pull of the trigger while the working internal components were intact and functional,” according to the report. The FBI lab also states that releasing the hammer when it was pulled back only a quarter or half did not result in enough impact to fire a round.
These are just a few of the details from the final investigative report that Santa Fe County district attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies will be considering as her office decides whether criminal charges are warranted. A decision about how to proceed is imminent, according to sources close to the case. The report focuses primarily on the actions of Baldwin, who was also a producer on the movie, assistant director Dave Halls, whom Baldwin says handed him the weapon and declared it was an inert “cold gun,” and armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, who was responsible for equipping the firearms on the movie.
The Five Bullets
Amid the hundreds of pieces of evidence in the case, these five items may be the most significant. The FBI analysis confirmed there were several other live rounds of .45 caliber ammunition present on the Rust set on the day Hutchins died, some of them adorning the costumes of other actors in the scene.
All of the real bullets were embossed with the “Starline Brass” logo, a company that supplies materials for homemade bullets. Two loose.45 rounds were collected from the top of a prop cart. A third was in a bandolier worn by one of the performers, and a fourth was found in a brown holster. The report didn’t indicate which belt belonged to which actor, but a source close to the production told Vanity Fair the bandolier belonged to the character played by Supernatural actor Jensen Ackles, and the holster was Baldwin’s. (Through a representative, Ackles declined to comment.)
The fifth live round was found in a box of dummy ammunition—fake bullets made to look like the real thing for camera close-ups. Dummies are completely harmless, with no explosive powder in them whatsoever (unlike blanks, which create a bang but don’t have a projectile attached).
This container “is the suspected box Hannah was loading the firearm with,” the report states. “This box contained 36 suspected dummy rounds, and one suspected live round, which is the cartridge that was tested.”
It’s not clear how the real bullet got into that container, but the report also included fingerprint testing of the box. “This report examined latent prints [on the container], against Gutierrez, Baldwin, [prop worker Sarah] Zachry, and Halls,” the document says. “Hannah is identified as the only person of interest with positive result identification of latent prints on the ammunition box.”
Gutierrez Reed’s attorney, Jason Bowles, issued a statement to Vanity Fair that continued to question whether an outside supplier introduced the bullets to the set, and noted that the investigation report did not include fingerprint analysis of the bullets themselves: “It’s inconceivable that the Sheriff did not request fingerprints and DNA from the Starline Brass rounds, as opposed to the boxes. Multiple people touched the various boxes on set. The boxes are not what caused the harm. The leathers [the bandolier and holster belt] are not what caused the harm. The central question is and always has been, where did the live rounds come from, because they were the instrument of catastrophic harm, when combined with the firearm in Baldwin’s hand. This is a serious flaw in the investigation and it begs the question, why did the sheriff not want to get to the bottom of this?”
Gutierrez Reed’s father, longtime movie armorer Thell Reed, had reached out to investigators to suggest that the live ammunition may have been introduced to the set by prop supplier Seth Kenney, and investigators served a search warrant on his Albuquerque shop in November 2021 to examine live rounds Thell Reed said the supplier had once used to train actors at a shooting range. “The chemistry testing revealed all the powder in these cartridges were uniform, however did not match the cartridges collected on the set of Rust,” the report says, apparently clearing Kenney of involvement. A box of dummies he supplied to the set was also found to be clear of any live ammunition.
How It Happened
While no other live rounds were found inside actual weapons, their presence on the prop cart and on the costumes of the actors demonstrates just how easily one of them could have been introduced into one of the firearms at any point during the production. The script called for a shoot-out between Baldwin’s character and Ackles, which was never performed, but one earlier sequence that was filmed for the movie involved a grown-up actor holding a child hostage, with the villain’s gun cocked and pointed at the back of the boy’s head. Any one of the live rounds of ammunition mingled around the set could have turned lethal during these scenes.