Here’s a look at the trial’s first week.
Emotional testimony
Halls took the stand on Thursday and told jurors, “My thought was that a blank round had been loaded.” He began to cry as he recounted being one of the first to approach Hutchins. “She said, ‘I can’t feel my legs.’”
Halls, who also served as the film’s safety coordinator, pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon last year and as part of a plea deal was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. Halls’ testimony marks the first time he spoke publicly about what happened on the set.
“It’s important to me that the truth be known, that Halyna’s husband, son, family know the truth of what happened,” he said when prosecutor Kari T. Morrissey asked him why he agreed to testify.
When Morrissey questioned Halls on Gutierrez-Reed’s on-set conduct with the weapons, he said that he never witnessed Gutierrez-Reed handle herself in an “improper” manner.
But Halls got emotional when he discussed the moments before the fatal shooting. Halls said he was the one who handed the gun to Baldwin during the rehearsal on set and declared the gun “cold” — meaning there were no rounds of live ammunition inside. Halls said during his testimony that he should have checked the gun more thoroughly and admitted that he “did an improper check of that firearm.”
Halls went on to say that he did not recall seeing Gutierrez-Reed spin the entire cylinder around to ensure all bullets were dummy rounds. While wiping away tears he said, “I let a safety check pass.”
Mystery around live bullets
Sarah Zachry, the film’s prop master and Gutierrez-Reed’s boss, said from the witness stand Friday that she only brought one box of dummy rounds to the “Rust” set and didn’t know who brought the live rounds that authorities found on set following the incident.
In the moments after the shooting, Zachry admitted that she took the live rounds out of the gun and “threw them away in…
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