Armorer Hannah Guiterez Found Guilty of Involuntary Manslaughter

This was the first trial to come out of the tragedy of the Rust movie set accident. Alec Baldwin's trial is in July.

The trial was streamed online and covered by multiple lawyers on YouTube, including Emily D Baker, Runkle of the Bailey, LegalBytes, and Law & Lumber. The verdict came in after only 2.5 hours of deliberation. While she was found not guilty on the weaker tampering charge, Hannah Gutierrez was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter due to the accidental death of Halyna Hutchins.

The entire trial was an epic clown show. The Special Prosecutor hired for these cases, Kari Morrissey, will likely get eaten alive by Baldwin’s lawyers in July. It seemed like she could not ask a question without leading the witness. She left almost half of her questions for redirect, which is only supposed to cover things asked about during the cross-exam. She also used speaking objections to get information to the jury, and her method of questioning was very confusing. Meanwhile, Hannah’s lawyer, Jason Bowles, talked so slowly that you could put the video on double-speed, and he would sound perfectly normal. It seemed like he didn’t know what he was doing and very rarely objected to anything. Whenever the prosecution would object, he would roll over; the judge didn’t even get to rule on most of the objections. The two got into sniping matches so often that by the end of day five, Judge Sommer decided that ALL objections must come to the bench in a sidebar. Judge Sommer also didn’t seem to understand the idea of live streaming the trial and made demands of CourtTV, like muting the audio for every sidebar.

For context, the armorer’s job on set includes training all of the actors on the proper handling of the firearms, as well as maintenance of all the firearms on set and safety checks before every scene involving a weapon. It is the armorer’s role to make sure everyone on set knows when they will be firing blanks and at what load. When it comes to safety and weapons, the armorer is the ultimate boss on set. They are allowed to stop filming to correct any safety issue.

This means that even though Alec Baldwin is a proper donkey’s rear who rushed filming, tried to tell Hannah how to do her job, and demanded his “hero props” at all times, it was literally Hannah’s job to tell him “No.” If he wouldn’t respect her or listen during training, it was her job to refuse to arm him. Instead, we were shown behind-the-scenes footage of a stuntman swinging his rifle around and handing it off to the kid on set, and Alec pointing around the set with his revolver and misfiring after “cut” was called. But the most damming footage showed Hannah herself, toting shotguns barrel-up and even holding one to her chest, barrel-up, aimed at her own head.

The verdict was never really a question. At the end of the day, it was Hannah’s job to do the safety checks properly. Youth and inexperience are no excuse for allowing live ammo to slip by you and not doing proper checks. If she had done her job correctly, Halyna would still be alive.

One of the more insane moments came on day nine of testimony. The defense brought in an "expert" in antique weapons, Frank Koucky III. This so-called “expert” pulled out what would ultimately be determined to be a non-functioning Denix revolver. But no one in the court knew that it was non-functioning before he held it up and flagged the entire room. Then, when asked by the judge to prove both the weapons he brought were unloaded, he actually pointed the weapon at the judge while trying to show the deputy and the jury it was unloaded. Oy vey.

By far, the biggest eye-opening moment of the trial came when Prop Master Sarah Zachry testified that she had been an armorer on a previous film without ever firing a gun. Yes, you read that right. Seth Kenney, the owner of PDQ Arm and Prop, trained Sarah in a few hours over the course of a couple of days in how to load/unload the few weapons that the unnamed previous film needed. That was all Sarah Zachry needed to be hired as an armorer. That is insane.

How is anyone supposed to be responsible for training others when they have only had a few hours of training themselves?

Hannah didn’t have any certification either. She told police in her interviews that while the union requires some certification, she wasn’t union yet and didn’t have any certs. Her only experience was working a few sets with her stepfather, Thell Reed, a man she bragged to police was “kinda THE industry.”

At a minimum, armorers should have taken a gun safety course. Realistically, anyone who wants to be an armorer should have experience firing weapons of all varieties and be NRA Instructor Certified.

The death of Brandon Lee on a movie set forced Hollywood to change how they handled firearms. Hopefully, the death of Halyna Hutchins will force Hollywood to change the rules concerning armorer certification.

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Lorraine Yuriar is a wife, mother, and lifelong conservative, currently stuck in a very blue state.