Alec Baldwin’s Rust Involuntary Manslaughter Trial Takes a Sudden Twist

There’s been a shocking turn of events in Alec Baldwin’s Rust trial.

The judge presiding over the case, as confirmed by NBC News, has sent the jury home during day three of the involuntary manslaughter trial after the defense team presented a surprise motion.

The actor’s attorneys, per the outlet, are accusing the state of hiding evidence involving ammunition that they say a “good Samaritan” gave to a crime scene technician following the trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. (She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to 18 months in prison).

Per NBC News, during trial, Baldwin’s defense team claimed the ammunition came from the film’s prop supplier Seth Kenney and may be connected to the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

As for the "good Samaritan,” he is identified in the motion as former Arizona police officer Troy Teske, a friend of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s father.

Meanwhile, prosecutor Kari Morrissey called the accusation against Kenney a “wild goose chase.”

E! News has reached out to Baldwin’s attorneys and prosecutors for comment and has not heard back.

The surprising move falls on the same day that Gutierrez-Reed was set to take the stand in Baldwin’s trial, though her testimony has now been delayed.

Back in May, during a pretrial interview, Gutierrez-Reed said she was unwilling to cooperate and that she didn’t want to take the stand, according to NBC News.

With the new motion to have the case thrown out, the outlet reports that a variety of outcomes are now on the table if the judge rules in favor of the defense, including a possible dismissal of Baldwin’s case or overturning Gutierrez-Reed’s conviction.

Keep reading for more trial bombshells...

(E! and NBC News are part of the NBCUniversal family.)

Video of Alec Baldwin rehearsing the scene in which he drew his gun inside an old church on the film set at Bonanza Creek Ranch was played for the jury as opening statements got underway July 10.

"So whip it out?" he's heard asking as he practices drawing the gun from behind his jacket three times.

Defense attorney Alex Spiro emphasized in his opening statement that his client is an actor, and that even if he did pull the trigger of the gun (which Baldwin has repeatedly denied doing), he wasn't responsible for Halyna Hutchins' death.

"He did not know, or have any reason to know," Spiro said, "that gun was loaded with a live bullet."

Spiro played the 911 call made by a script supervisor on the set after Hutchins was shot at 1:46 p.m. on Oct. 21, 2021.

"This f-----g AD that yelled at me at lunch asking about revisions," the caller said, "this motherf--ker... he's responsible."

First assistant director David Halls was sentenced to six months unsupervised probation in March 2023 after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon.

Investigators determined that Halls and production armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed were the last people to handle the gun that discharged the fatal bullet before it was given to Baldwin.

Gutierrez was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in March and sentenced to a maximum 18 months in jail, the same sentence Baldwin is facing if convicted. 

The state raised several objections during Spiro's opening, including after he said it was "part of the human condition, part of grief," for people to want to make sense of a tragedy and seek justice.

"Justice is truth," Spiro concluded his statement. "This is an unspeakable tragedy. Alec Baldwin committed no crime."

Testimony began July 10 with prosecution witness Nicholas LeFleur, a Santa Fe Police Department officer who was working for the sheriff's office at the time and was first on the scene at Bonanza Creek Ranch after Hutchins was shot.

Over the defense's strenuous objections during pre-trial motions, footage from LeFleur's body cam was played for the jury, including fraught scenes of Hutchins being attended to after being shot. At first the crew is inside the church before she was moved into an ambulance for further treatment, as LeFleur explained on the stand, while they waited for a helicopter to arrive to airlift her to the hospital.

LeFleur testified that he went to his vehicle to get crime scene tape to secure the perimeter (as seen in the body-cam footage) but couldn't remember if he was asked to or if it was just instinctual.

"I knew we needed to start one," he said.

Baldwin, seen in the footage smoking a cigarette, was not separated from the rest of the witnesses before authorities took his statement, LeFleur said, but "I did tell him to stop talking."

On cross-examination, LeFleur testified that he did not know, when he put the tape up, whether a crime had been committed or an accident had occurred.

LeFleur acknowledged under cross-examination that, while he testified for the prosecution that he told Baldwin not to speak with fellow witnesses, he did not approach or otherwise re-instruct the actor to stop talking to others. The officer also said yes when Spiro asked if, more often than not, people were going up to Baldwin to speak with him.

Moreover, Spiro contended, there were eventually numerous police cruisers on set and Baldwin could have been asked to sit in any one of them, separate from the others, but no officer had him do so. LeFleur agreed with that assessment. 

Investigators found live bullets along with so-called dead ones when they searched the Rust set following the shooting, Santa Fe Sherriff's Office crime scene technician Marissa Poppell testified July 11.

There were live rounds in the prop cart, inside a munition box and in gun holsters for two actors, she acknowledged during Spiro's cross-examination. Image shown in court showed that the live ammo had a silver dot at the bottom, while the dummies were more golden or bronze.

"Your working theory, as you evaluated the ammunition and looked at the similarity between the Starline nickel live and the Starline nickel dummies is that they could have been easily commingled there?" Spiro asked.

She said yes. Added Spiro? "In other words, somebody could have mistaken one for the other, right?"

Poppell replied, "Yes."

According to her July 10 testimony, Poppell was the one who collected Baldwin's shoulder holster from the church after the shooting and it held one live round of ammunition.

Hearing motions during the jury's lunch break, First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer allowed prosecutors to introduce into evidence a portion of a phone call Baldwin made to wife Hilaria Baldwin from the police station after Hutchins was shot—in which he encouraged her to visit him in New Mexico, saying they'd "have fun."

Baldwin didn't know Hutchins had died when he made the call, but knew she was seriously injured, special prosecutor Kari Morrissey asserted in court.

"If the defense hasn't spent all of this time saying how...panicked and upset he was," Morrissey said, "I'm not sure that it would be relevant, but he is actually planning basically a vacation."

The judge told Baldwin's lawyers, who objected on several points, "I do find that it's relevant to basically respond to you all talking about how upset Mr Baldwin was, and certainly you considered that fact of consequence."

Under Spiro's cross, Poppell denied withholding evidence by not adding a box of bullets she was given by a "good Samaritan" after Gutierrez's trial to the overall Rust-related evidence, or by not showing it to the defense. She said she never gave any evidence to the defense.

Morrissey identified the person who gave Poppell the munitions as a friend of Gutierrez's father, veteran Hollywood armorer Thell Reed. The prosecutor insinutated the man was looking to implicate Seth Kenney, the Rust weapon supplier, in bringing live rounds to the set.

Poppell said during redirect that she had no evidence that Kenney had brought the live rounds to set, but she did have evidence that Gutierrez did.

Gutierrez's attorney Jason Bowles told NBC News it was "beyond shocking" that the bullets in question weren't tested to see if they were the same kind as others found on the Rust set.

"They were hiding the ball until called out on it in trial," Bowles said. "If you want to get to the truth, you run down all leads."

The jury had only been seated for a brief time on the morning of July 12 when Judge Sommer sent them home for the day in the wake of the defense's motion accusing the state of burying evidence.

Poppell testified to receiving a box of ammunition from former Arizona police officer Troy Teske—a friend of Gutierrez's father previously identified as a "good Samaritan"—after Gutierrez was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March for her role in Hutchins' death.

Spiro previously questioned Poppell about why did she didn't file the box with the rest of the Rust case evidence, alleging it could have connected the production's weapons supplier Seth Kenney to the live rounds.

This morning, before the jury was brought in, Poppell again denied intentionally hiding anything, telling Spiro she filed the box under a different case number as she was instructed to do.

After a lunch break, the prosecution called PDQ Props owner Kenney, who was hired to provide the Rust production with prop firearms and dummy rounds, to testify without the jury present.

The defense has contended that Kenney could have brought live rounds to the set along with the dummies.

He denied as much, telling special prosecutor Morrissey that, having supplied more than a thousand productions with dummy rounds, "there was never a question" in his mind as to whether he could have brought the live rounds to set.

Morrissey called the defense's attempt to blame Kenney "a wild goose chase."

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