A shocking new video shows the moment before Halyna Hutchins was shot by Alec Baldwin on the “Rust” set!
The clip, contained in a trove of documents released by the Santa Fe, New Mexico Sheriff’s Office, was taken by Hutchins on the day of the shooting in a mock church at the Bonanza Creek Ranch. It shows Baldwin, 64, rehearsing a “cross draw” on the set of the doomed Western movie.
With Hutchins behind the camera, Baldwin is shown sitting in a pew and dressed in 1880s-style Western garb as he rehearses whipping out the F.lli Pietta 45 Long Colt Revolver that went off and left the cinematographer dead and the film’s director Joel Souza injured.
The clip has no sound, but it shows Baldwin speaking, and it cuts off before the shooting as Hutchins turns the camera around to tweak a setting and Baldwin keeps rehearsing.
Cops previously said the actor was practicing the move, which required him to point the gun directly at the camera in the moments leading up to the shooting. Both Hutchins and Souza were in the line of fire when the revolver went off.
Souza told investigators that he remembered hearing the phrase “cold gun” while preparing for the scene, indicating the firearm wasn’t loaded and was safe for use, but he couldn’t remember if the gun had been checked after the crew returned from a lunch break before the incident.
The director told cops he heard a “loud pop” moments after the shooting and realized both he and Hutchins were bleeding, according to a police interview.
The video is part of a slew of investigative files the sheriff’s office just released that details their probe into the fatal mishap.
The records include crime scene photos, body cam footage, staff photos, dashcam footage, and other evidence that’s been collected since the incident, which occurred in October of 2021.
Following a surge of traffic to a Dropbox folder containing the files, the site crashed minutes after it was widely sent out to the media on Monday, Apr. 25. The documents were inaccessible for about three hours.
The files came back online around 5:30 p.m. ET that day.
A number of components are still in the process of being collected and were not included in the release, the sheriff’s office said in a press release about the files being made public.
The items yet to be released include FBI firearm and ballistics information, DNA and fingerprint analyses, the medical examiner’s report, and the data extracted from Baldwin’s cell phone.
“Once these investigative components are provided to the sheriff’s office, we will be able to complete the investigation to forward it to the Santa Fe District Attorney for review,” Sheriff Adan Mendoza said in a statement.
In the days following the shooting, both the district attorney and sheriff said criminal charges for those involved, including Baldwin, were yet to be ruled out. They said they wouldn’t comment further until the investigation is complete.
Baldwin’s attorney, Luke Nikas of Quinn Emanuel, told The NY Post in a statement that the records released prove the actor’s innocence.
“Mr. Baldwin welcomes this investigation. The information that has been revealed by the authorities demonstrates, once again, that Mr. Baldwin acted responsibly and did not have control over any production issues that were identified in the OSHA report,” Nikas said.
“Additionally, the interviews and affidavits disclosed [Monday] continue to corroborate Mr. Baldwin’s description of the events—including an affidavit from the Detective stating that the cameraman, who was standing next to Ms. Hutchins and Mr. Souza at the time of the accident, confirmed that Mr. Baldwin was ‘very careful’ with guns on the set.”
You can check out the video here.