An attorney for Dave Halls, the assistant director on the set of “Rust,” corroborated Alec Baldwin’s claim that he never pulled the trigger of the antique gun that discharged in that October movie set shooting, telling ABC on Thursday that her client has said “the entire time Baldwin had his finger outside the trigger guard, parallel to the barrel.”
“He told me since day one he thought it was a misfire,” attorney Lisa Torraco said of her client, adding, “until Alec [Baldwin] said that, it was just really hard to believe, but he told me that since the very first time I met him, that Alec [Baldwin] did not pull the trigger.”
ABC also spoke to one of the suppliers of ammunition for the production, Seth Kenney, who said the live rounds seized by investigators from his prop shop on Wednesday do not match the live rounds that were on set.
“They found four rounds that were close enough to take in with them. They’re not a match, but they were close so there’s something very unique about the live rounds that were found on ‘Rust,’ but we’ve got to wait for the FBI to do its job,” Kenney said.
But Kenney denied that the live rounds that ended up on the Colt .45 gun were provided by him. “It’s not a possibility that they came from PDQ [the supplier] or myself personally. When we send dummy rounds out, they get individually rattle-tested before they get sent out. So if you have a box of 50, you’ve got to do it 50 times and at that point you know they’re safe to send,” Kenney said.
In an affidavit entered into court this week, a detective wrote that Kenney told authorities that he had received “reloaded ammunition” from a friend two years earlier that “stuck out to him.” The round, which Kenney suspected was live, was in a cartridge with the logo of Starline Brass, a company he said only sells components of ammunition, not live ammunition.
The affidavit also described how Thell Reed, an industry veteran and the father of “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, told detectives in an interview that he had given Kenney an “ammo can” with live rounds for training on a different movie this year and never received it back. Reed said he believed the can was still in Kenney’s possession, according to the affidavit.