- Experts say that Alec Baldwin and the Rust crew ignored several critical gun safety rules that could have avoided the tragic death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the movie set Thursday
- Zak Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer, said there’s no reason a gun should pointed at another person and that live ammunition should never be on a movie set
- Baldwin tweeted a Variety article on Friday that he ‘was told prop gun was safe before fatal shooting’
- Hutchins’ husband shared a touching tribute to his wife following her tragic death on Thursday
- Matthew Hutchins posted sweet a photo of his wife with their 9-year-old son Andros on Twitter captioned: ‘Halyna inspired us all with her passion and vision, and her legacy is too meaningful to encapsulate in words’
- Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed and assistant director Dave Halls were named in a search warrant on Friday
- ‘Cold gun!’ shouted Halls, a veteran assistant director who worked on Fargo and The Matrix Reloaded
- When Baldwin pulled the trigger, a bullet was fired, killing the cinematographer and injuring the director
- In an interview, Gutierrez-Reed said she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be a head armorer
- Meanwhile, troubling reports highlight safety concerns on the set of Baldwin’s Western film, Rust
- Production crew on the set of Rust walked out on Thursday morning in a row over safety and long hours
- On Thursday, when they arrived to pack up, they found a team of non-union workers waiting to replace them
- Hutchins decided to stay on the set and film with Alec Baldwin and the film director Joel Souza
Alec Baldwin ignored the golden rule of gun safety by pointing the prop at someone but the gun never should have been loaded with live ammunition to begin with, experts say.
Zak Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer who is a member of Local 44, told DailyMail.com on Friday: ‘There should have never been live rounds on a movie set, that’s number one. Number two is every single person on a movie set has a right to inspect a weapon before it’s fired. And number three is, there is no reason to ever put a person in front of a weapon that’s firing.
‘Anytime you see a movie where the barrel is pointed down the camera lens, there should not be an operator behind it. It’s obvious that the considerations of this resulted in that gun being pointed directly at two people.
‘We would have additionally had a barrier between them. A large number of people failed to do our protocols… every accident is a cascade of events,’ he said.
Whatever happened in the moments leading up to her death, Knight said it was caused by a ‘cascade of failures’ by multiple people. ‘We have a hard and fast rule that no live ammunition ever goes into a prop truck or set at any time. We just don’t do it.
‘If you see bullets on set they are complete dummy rounds and are in no way functional. This goes back to Brandon Lee. There’s protocol.’ Lee was killed in a similar incident when another actor shot him with a prop gun that was loaded with live ammunition while filming The Crow in 1993.
By ADRIANA DIAZ
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