Approximately 11 a.m., Hannah has loaded five dummies. They were clearly dummies,” says Bowles, Gutierrez Reed’s lawyer, adding that his client had shaken every one of them to check. “The sixth round would not go in, so she left it with five. She handed that over to Baldwin. They did a brief thing, and then they broke for lunch.”
At that point, Bowles says the gun went back to Gutierrez Reed, who locked it in the prop truck’s safe. After lunch, around 1 p.m., she went to retrieve it—and fix that empty sixth slot. Dummies are necessary because the ends of the revolver’s cylinder are exposed, and viewers would be able to tell if the chambers were empty.
“So she cleans the cylinder and she pulls another round, a different round, out of that box and puts that round into the chamber,” Bowles says. At the same time, he says she was being urgently summoned to set over her radio.
Did she shake that last round to make sure it was a dummy? “Yes,” her attorney says. “She thought it had rattled, but at the same time, people are screaming in her earpiece, ‘Get the gun, get the gun.’ But she thought it had rattled.”
At some point, a real bullet made its way into that gun. So was that last round the one that killed Halyna Hutchins? “We don’t know for sure, because that gun was out of her eyesight and custody for 15 minutes,” Bowles says, referring to when Gutierrez Reed handed the gun over for the rehearsal moments later and left the church. “But if indeed nobody else had access to it, then yes, that would’ve been the round, the live round.”
Five errors contributed to cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’s death. Inside the investigation into a fatal accident that’s shaken the film industry—and sent the district attorney on a quest for answers.
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