Alec Baldwin’s career hangs in the balance after killing a crewmember.
He still faces the specter of criminal prosecution and civil litigation.
But the district attorney made a jaw-dropping statement in Alec Baldwin’s shooting incident.
Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin could be finished if he gets charged in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during the filming of the western Rust.
New Mexico law enforcement has not yet decided on whether to file criminal charges against Baldwin.
But Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies dropped a bombshell when she said that Baldwin might not have pulled the trigger when he held the gun in his hand.
Baldwin first made that assertion during an interview with Clintonite George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
Baldwin claimed:
Asked by @GStephanopoulos how a real bullet got on the “Rust” set, Alec Baldwin says: “I have no idea. Someone put a live bullet in a gun. A bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”
Watch TOMORROW 8pm ET on ABC and stream later on @hulu. https://t.co/fJQly1za1T pic.twitter.com/OnpDuYERiC
— ABC News (@ABC) December 1, 2021
Carmack-Altwies said she saw Baldwin’s interview and decided to do some digging.
From The New York Post:
“Carmack-Altwies launched an unofficial investigation of her own to test Baldwin’s claims that he had only pulled back the hammer of the gun before it went off, firing the live bullet that fatally struck Hutchins in the chest and wounded the film’s director Joel Souza, who was hit in the clavicle…Her test revealed that the hammer could have caused the live round to fire, however official results from an FBI analysis of the weapon are still pending.”
Carmack-Altwies also spoke to Vanity Fair in a piece that partly read like a glowing profile.
The piece opens:
“Mary Carmack-Altwies raced across the desert, chasing some peace and quiet. She had won her campaign to become Santa Fe’s district attorney the year before, and her first 10 months in office were intense and all-consuming. In her previous life as a public defender and later working in private practice, she always internalized her cases. She felt that empathy made her a good attorney, but it was depleting. ‘I’ve spent basically my entire career working the worst of the worst cases. And so I feel it a lot,’ she says.”
Carmack-Altwies then commented on her investigation into the shooting:
“I didn’t know too much about guns, certainly not about 1850s-era revolvers. So when I first heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy’…You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it…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.”
Why Carmack-Altwies is sitting for sweeping Vanity Fair pieces is anyone’s guess, but her contention that Baldwin didn’t pull the trigger is a major curveball in the case.
However, Baldwin is not out of the woods yet, and he could still bear responsibility for not following proper gun safety protocols.