Alec Baldwin says he won't be criminally charged for shooting; Plus the full FBI forensic and autopsy reports

Actor still denies pulling the trigger and blames his crew for killing Halyna Hutchins

Since I wrote to you last week about the FBI forensics report that proved Alec Baldwin pulled the trigger, he’s been on a publicity tour to continue to deny doing it. He’s upping the ante by claiming to have inside information that he will not be criminally charged for shooting two people and killing one.

Ten months after Baldwin broke all the gun safety rules, he is spinning the media and public to blame his movie crew for killing Halyna Hutchins.

Many of you wanted to read the FBI reports for yourself, so I got them from the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office. Also, I got the medical examiner’s autopsy report for Hutchins. The documents are all attached at the bottom for paid subscribers.

I read and summarized the FBI forensics here and the autopsy here.

No criminal charges?

Baldwin told CNN on Friday that he hired a private investigator after the shooting.

That private investigator, as you probably know, did not have a difficult time accessing the staff of the sheriff’s department. And that person told us - quote unquote - we’ve known in the department since January that Alec would not be charged with a crime.

Baldwin blame game:

I wrote last year about the top 10 outrageous excuses from Baldwin for why he’s not at fault and feels no guilt. From his first interview with sheriff detectives, Baldwin has insisted actors don’t follow gun safety rules and that his employees on the “Rust” movie set were responsible for the shooting.

But now he’s blaming specific people who worked for him. He defiantly said on CNN:

I want everybody to know that those are the two people that are responsible for what happened.

Baldwin was on Chris Cuomo’s podcast and pointed the finger at his assistant director Dave Halls:

The man who was the principal safety officer of the film declared in front of the entire assemblage, “This is a cold gun.” Now, why did he say that if he didn’t know and hadn’t checked?

He also blames the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, for killing Hutchins. He told CNN:

Her job was to look at the ammunition and put in the dummy round or the blank round, and there wasn’t supposed to be any live rounds on the set.

Baldwin says Reed is the one at fault, even though he never checked the gun himself to see what was loaded in it. You’ll remember actor George Clooney said he always checks his own guns on sets.

Reed told the investigators that she loaded the gun but did not know how the live round got on set. She is suing Seth Kenney, the movie's gun and ammunition supplier.

Baldwin’s trigger defense

The FBI report is definitive (my summary is below) that Baldwin pulled the trigger. But he’s still denying it.

Baldwin told Cuomo a new excuse that conflicts with the FBI forensics. He said he was “fanning the gun” and that he “pulled [the hammer] back to an extent where it would fire the bullet without you pulling the trigger.”

He told CNN, “I never once said - never - that the gun went off in my hand — automatically. I always said I pulled the hammer back, and I pulled it back as far as I could. I never took a gun and pointed at somebody and clicked the thing.” He gestured pulling a trigger for “the thing.”

Let’s put aside the gazillion times he said he didn’t pull the trigger. But claiming he “never once“ said the gun just went off?

Here’s what he told the Santa Fe Sheriff’s detectives on video the day of the shooting on the “Rust” movie set:

I took the gun, showing him and going, “I’m going to go like this, like this, like this” cock and turn — bang — it went off.

Here’s what he said last December on ABC News:

I cocked the gun, Can you see that? Can you see that? And then I let go of the hammer of the gun, and the gun goes off.

Aiming the gun

As for Baldwin’s claim to CNN that he “never” pointed a gun at someone— which is one of the three gun safety rules— he previously admitted doing it and blamed Hutchins.

ABC: There are some who say you're never supposed to point a gun on anyone on a set no matter what.

BALDWIN: Unless the person is the cinematographer who's directing me at where to point the gun for her camera angle.

He also admitted doing it to the sheriff’s detectives, but blamed the other victim, his director Joel Souza:

I always aim to go away. But [Hutchins] was there. And in the rehearsal, Souza wanted to pull out the gun and cock the gun. And if you’re assuming you have a cold gun, there’s no problem

FBI Forensics - gun and ammo

The FBI forensics report on the firearm and ammunition (attached below) concluded that the gun — a .45 Long Colt F.lli Pietta single-action revolver, Model 1873 — “functioned normally when tested.”

But then it also said the gun fired in the fully cocked position which was the “only successful discharge during this testing and it was attributed to the fracture of internal components.”

As I wrote in the last story, the FBI testing for accidental discharge showed that “with the hammer in the 1/4 and 1/2 cock positions” and full cock positions, the gun “could not be made to fire without a pull of the trigger” while the “working internal components were intact and functional.” The full report says that with the hammer at rest on a loaded chamber, it detonated a primer without a pull of the trigger, but didn’t fire.

The ammo in evidence is a mix of live rounds, blanks and dummy rounds. (In movies, a blank has a projectile and powder, a dummy does not.)

The bullet from Souza’s shoulder came from a cartridge case with the “headstamp of Starline brass.” The FBI notes that,“ Starline only manufactures brass (cartridge cases) which must be loaded/assembled by another source.”

Some of you have asked about the internal mechanisms. The report says it has a hammer with a fixed firing pin and “does not contain any internal safety mechanisms to prevent the firing pin from striking the primer of a chambered cartridge, such as a transfer bar or hammer block.”

The FBI did a DNA test on the Colt revolver (attached below) which concluded Baldwin’s DNA was on it, and possibly Reed as well as her supervisor, Prop Master Sarah Zachary and Assistant Director Dave Halls, who handed Baldwin the gun.

The Quantico lab also took fingerprints from all those same people, cartridges and boxes from the movie set (attached.)

The lawyer for the armorer, Reed, asked the sheriff’s department to request the FBI do a fingerprint and DNA test on the live round casing to know who brought it to the set. The FBI didn’t do it. The lawyer, Jason Bowles, said in a statement this week:

It is inconceivable that the Sheriff would not seek answers to this fundamental question and it raises a serious problem with the entire investigation.

Bowles’s emails back and forth with the sheriff’s detectives are below in my sources.

Hutchins’s autopsy:

The Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque, NM concludes that her death from a gunshot wound to the chest “is best classified as an accident.” (It is attached in my sources, along with the toxicology report.)

The medical examiner also says there is an “absence of obvious intent to cause harm or death” by anyone involved in the Oct. 21, 2021 shooting.

It’s terribly sad to read the details of how the bullet tore apart her body. She was the cinematographer for the “Rust” movie, as well as a wife and mother of a young son.

While Baldwin did not intend to kill Hutchins, he knowingly broke gun safety rules by pulling the trigger, pointing a gun at people and not checking to see if the gun was loaded with a live round.

And he knows better. He told ABC News:

I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never. Never. That was the training that I had.

Baldwin blamed the victim, Hutchins, for telling him to point the gun at her during rehearsal:

She's guiding me through how she wants me to hold the gun for this angle. I'm holding the gun where she told me to hold it, which ended up being aimed right below her armpit.

Now that these reports are concluded, the sheriff says the only thing left open in the investigation is the analysis of Baldwin’s cell phone, which will come from Suffolk County, NY police. Then the District Attorney will decide if anyone will be charged in Hutchins’s tragic death. But if Baldwin’s inside sources are correct, he will not be held accountable for his actions, which will show two systems of justice for the rich and famous and everyone else.

SOURCES:

FBI Forensics Reports, Office of the Medical Investigator report, autopsy: