On Oct. 21, 2021, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then 24, arrived at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an hour or so before sunrise and reported to her job as the armorer and props assistant on the set of the low-budget indie Western Rust. She took a COVID test, swung by the catering tent and headed to the prop truck to prepare weapons the cast would need that day, including Alec Baldwin’s gun, a long Colt .45 revolver, which she loaded with what she has said she thought were dummy rounds.

When first assistant director Dave Halls called for Gutierrez-Reed on a walkie-talkie, she walked to a church set on the edge of the ranch’s mock Western town and approached Halls, seated in a pew with director of photography Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza, conferring about the schedule. That morning, most of the camera crew had walked off in a protest of their working conditions, and the remaining crew were scrambling. “I told him I needed a weapons check, and he said, ‘We don’t have time,’ ” Gutierrez-Reed said of Halls, according to testimony she gave to New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau (OHSB) in December of 2022.

About two hours later, the gun Gutierrez-Reed had stored, cleaned and loaded for Baldwin fired a live bullet into Hutchins’ chest, killing the 42-year-old cinematographer and injuring Souza, who stood beside her. The shooting, a rare and horrifying accident in a film industry that was built on gunslinging imagery, would shine a light on the use of real weapons on sets, the ramifications of low-budget filmmakers’ penny-pinching and the dysfunction of a Santa Fe prosecutor’s office charged with figuring out who exactly is to blame.