The one person who actually went to prison for the 2021 shooting death of Rust cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is free just weeks after the tragedy suffused Alec Baldwin starring indie Western premiered and then promptly disappeared in a cloud of box office dust earlier this month.
According to the New Mexico Department of Corrections, the film’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was granted parole earlier this week and released on May 23. Having served the state statute required 85% of her 18-month sentence and received extra marks for good behavior and the completion of a drug rehab program, records show Gutierrez-Reed having signed out of the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility on Friday morning. She quickly headed to her home in Bullhead City, Arizona where she will serve out her parole.
A very situation specific part of that parole is that Gutierrez-Reed cannot have contact with Hutchins’ widower, child or any other member of the filmmaker’s family.
The stepdaughter of famed movie gun coach Thell Reed, the relatively inexperienced Gutierrez-Reed was charged with involuntary manslaughter and evidence tampering out of Hutchins’ death from a gun in Baldwin’s hand going off. Even before Gurierrez-Reed was charged in January 2023, the prosecution claimed the armorer was responsible for live rounds ending up on the Rust set. In a production under intense budget and time crunches, and film crews quitting, those live rounds got into Baldwin’s 1880s Colt .45 replica that that fired during rehearsals on the Bonanza Creek set, striking Hutchins and director Joel Souza.
With her parole stretching from May 23, 2025 to May 23, 2026, the twentysomething Gutierrez-Reed has to get a job, as well as submit to a curfew, and mental health assessment as some of the conditions of her parole. She also can’t own guns, has to meet regularly with a parole officer and agree to electronic monitoring. In point of fact, Gutierrez-Reed is under what’s called dual supervision. That shakes down as a year for her involuntary manslaughter convictions and a year and a half for a different charge of “unlawfully” entering a firearm banning Santa Fe bar before Rust went into production with a gun on her.
On March 6, 2024, a Sante Fe jury found the Rust armorer guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal October 21, 2021 shooting. Despite the state’s best effort, the jurors’ decision was split as they decided the defendant was not guilty of evidence tampering. Six weeks later, Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced to 18 months bars.
Baldwin never ended up spending a second in prison, nor even a full week before a jury in his own case last summer. The media frenzy matter was tossed out four days in by the judge due to evidence suppression by the prosecution and local cops. All appeals have been dropped, though the 30 Rock actor and now reality star in January filed paperwork to pursue a civil rights violations lawsuit against the special prosecutors.
Gutierrez-Reed continues to have appeal of her conviction moving through the New Mexico courts. Her defense lawyer Jason Bowles did not respond Saturday to request for comment from Deadline on his client’s release from prison.
Finding a new cinematographer in Bianca Cline, the eventually finished Rust debuted at a Polish film festival in December 2024. The movie finally found U.S. distribution via Falling Forward Films, with a short lived domestic theatrical run starting on May 2.
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