New details from the ongoing investigation into the deadly Rust shooting suggest that Alec Baldim may have fired the gun without pulling the trigger.
“One of the investigators in my office happens to have a very old type revolver, and so he brought it, at my request, so that we could look at it and see if that was at all possible,” Santa Fe County district attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies told Vanity Fair.
Two investigators examined the weapon: “You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it,” she explained. “So you pull it back partway, it doesn’t lock, and then if you let it go, the firing pin can hit the primer of the bullet.”
Last week, Baldwin and Rust producers were sued over the accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“Halyna deserved to live,” reads the complaint. “The Defendants had the power to prevent her death if they only held sacrosanct their duty to protect the safety of every individual on a set where firearms were present instead of cutting corners on safety procedures where human lives were at stake, rushing to stay on schedule and ignoring numerous complaints of safety violations.”