David Halls, the assistant director of Rust, told investigators he should have checked the gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins more thoroughly.
The gun in question was supposed to be used as a prop by Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal for a scene that called for him to point the gun at the camera.
Baldwin accidentally fired the gun, not knowing there were live rounds in it, and ultimately fatally wounded the 42-year-old mother-of-one.
Having noticed a difference in the ammunition rounds, Halls now says he should have been more cautious about the gun before handing it over to Baldwin, a search warrant affidavit has revealed, per TODAY.
Halls told authorities that he failed to check each individual round of ammunition in the gun before giving it back to the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, on the day that Hutchins was killed.
Following the fatal incident, Halls took the gun to Gutierrez-Reed and saw about four "dummy" casings with the hole on the side, and one without the hole, when she opened the firearm. The round without the hole did not have a "cap" on it and just contained the casing.
The warrant affidavit reads: "David advised when Hannah showed him the firearm before continue rehearsal, he could only remember seeing three rounds. He advised he should’ve checked all of them, but didn’t, and couldn’t recall if she spun the drum."
The rounds found on the set included blanks, dummy rounds, and what police believe to be "live" rounds.
Halls told investigators he was responsible for yelling "cold gun" meaning that a gun doesn't contain live rounds. On the day of the incident, he announced that the weapon was a "cold gun" before handing it to the 30 Rock star.
On Wednesday, October 27, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza questioned why live ammunition would be present on the set in the first place.
Per CNN, he said: "We’re going to determine whether, we suspect, that there were other live rounds. We’re going to determine how those got there, why they were there because they shouldn’t have been there."
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