Six months after Alec Baldwin shot and killed a cameraman on the set of the movie “Rest,” raising questions about who was at fault and how live ammunition ended up on set, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office said Monday there were still no were important pieces of evidence. including ballistics analysis, which it said it had to complete its criminal investigation.
The cameraman, Halyna Hutchins, 42, was shot and killed in New Mexico on Oct. 21 during rehearsal for a scene in which Mr. Baldwin had to pull an old-fashioned replica revolver from a shoulder holster that he had been told contained no living object. ammunition.
The gun went off, firing a bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins and wounded Joel Souza, the film’s director. Since then, the Santa Fe sheriff’s office has been collecting evidence and investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
But the sheriff’s office said it was still missing key building blocks from its investigation to pass the case to the Santa Fe County District Attorney for review.
Sheriff Adan Mendoza said in a statement that “several parts of the investigation are still pending,” including Federal Bureau of Investigation firearms and ballistics forensics, DNA and latent fingerprint analysis, a report from the New Mexico Medical Examiner’s office. and the analysis of Mr. Baldwin’s phone records, extracted by investigators in Suffolk County, NY
“Once these investigative components are provided to the sheriff’s office, we can complete the investigation and forward it to the Santa Fe District Attorney for review,” Sheriff Mendoza said in a statement from his office.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately return a request for comment about the delay on the outstanding evidence.
Despite months of evidence gathering, no findings have been made public, and it still remains unclear how live bullets made their way onto the film set and how one of them got into the gun Mr. Baldwin was wielding.
The sheriff’s office took the step to release its files related to the “Rust” investigation, but the documents quickly became inaccessible due to high traffic to the website. The office said the files contained witness interviews, lapel and dash camera images from officers and detectives, and crime scene photos.
The sheriff’s office said there was still no analysis of Mr. Baldwin, which he handed over to the Suffolk County Police Department in January.
Mr. Baldwin agreed to a process where he handed over his iPhone and his password, and the phone’s details would be reviewed by officers from the Suffolk County Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office before the relevant details were passed on to the authorities in New Mexico.
Last week, New Mexico state regulators criticized the film’s producers and found that the film management’s indifference to the dangers of handling guns on set had led to the death of Ms. Hutchins, and they fined them $ 136,793 to the manufacturing company, the maximum allowed under state law.
