Alec Baldwin may not have pulled trigger in Rust deadly shooting

The prosecutor investigating the deadly shooting on the set of Rust has made a shock admission after watching Alec Baldwin’s bombshell interview.

An informal experiment conducted by a New Mexico prosecutor could prove that Alec Baldwin may have fired the shot that killed ‘Rust’ cinematographer Halyna Hutchins without pulling the gun’s trigger.

Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies told Vanity Fair she had watched the actor’s bombshell interview with ABC in December and was drawn to the actor’s claim that he did not pull the trigger.

“You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it,” she said.

“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.”

Alec Baldwin during his interview where he claims he didn’t pull the fatal trigger.

Baldwin had insisted in the interview that the trigger was never pulled.

“I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them, never,” he said.

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.

“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,’ ” she told Vanity Fair.

“One of the investigators in my office happens to have a very old-type revolver, and so he brought it, at my request, so that we could look at it and see if that was at all possible.”

Halyna Hutchins was killed on set.

She said the group cleared a room in her office, made sure the weapon was empty, and attempted to re-enact Baldwin’s actions leading up to the deadly shooting.

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.

While Baldwin said he did not pull the trigger, a lawsuit filed by a “Rust” script supervisor in November alleges that he “intentionally” fired the gun at Hutchins.

And the family of cinematographer Hutchins filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against actor Baldwin last week, while releasing a chilling video re-enacting the shooting.

Lawyers filed the suit in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, on behalf of Matthew Hutchins, the husband of Halyna Hutchins, and the couple’s nine-year-old son.

They claim that several industry-wide practices that meant to keep movie sets safe were disregarded.

“The lawsuit names Alec Baldwin and others who are responsible for the safety on the set and whose reckless behaviour and cost-cutting led to the senseless and tragic death of Halyna Hutchins,” lawyer Brian Panish told a news conference in Los Angeles.

Originally published as Alec Baldwin may not have pulled trigger in Rust deadly shooting