Bodycam footage reveals how Alec Baldwin fatally shot filmmaker Halyna Hutchins

‘I take the gun out slowly,’ star tells investigators. ‘I turn and cock the pistol. Bang! She hits the ground.’ | WATCH

WARNING: Graphic

Footage of Alec Baldwin whipping a revolver from his jacket moments before it went off in his hand and fatally wounded a cinematographer has been released by a sheriff’s office investigating her death.

Two videos showing Baldwin sitting on a pew in a gloomy church on a film set in New Mexico were released by the Santa Fe county sheriff, Adan Mendoza, along with police interviews, reports and body camera video from officers who arrived on the set of a western called Rust on October 21.

“I take the gun out slowly,” Baldwin told the investigators. “I turn and cock the pistol. Bang! She hits the ground, she goes down.”

At the time they were still rehearsing the piece, so the director, Joel Souza, and the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, were behind the camera and in the line of fire, he told a detective.

Souza told an officer that he felt as if he had been “kicked in the shoulder and then I was down on my ass. And then I looked over and see Halyna Hutchins, with blood coming out of her back. She was between me and, I think, where the gun went off and I think it went through her and into me.”

He remembered the film’s armourer, Hannah Gutierrez, who handled the weapons on set, standing over him “hysterically yelling ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’,” according to a police report. A doctor told Souza that a “45-calibre slug” had been pulled from his back and handed to the police.

Baldwin was interviewed by detectives before he was aware that Hutchins had died. The gun “was supposed to be cold, or empty”, he said. “I’m the one that shot the gun that had a live bullet go through that woman’s body and into his body, and I need to know how did that happen?”

In another video, he is seen talking on the phone, saying: “I don’t want to do this any more, I don’t want to be a public person … I’m the one holding the gun in my hand and everybody was supposed to have taken care of [it]. They always hand me a cold gun.”

According to a police report of a phone call Baldwin had with an investigator about two weeks later, the actor said that when the gun discharged he had pulled the hammer back three-quarters of the way and let it go. He said he did not pull the trigger, though his finger was on it at the time.

Alexandria Hancock, a detective, suggested that if his finger was on the trigger as he pulled the hammer back, there may have been “enough pressure on the trigger for him to depress it”.

In a statement Mendoza said that “various components of the investigation remain outstanding, including FBI firearm and ballistic forensics and analysis of Baldwin’s phone data”. Once those had been received the local district attorney would decide whether charges were warranted.

Set armourer Hannah Gutierrez Reed seconds after Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Picture: Sante Fe County Sheriff's Office

A representative for Gutierrez said a review of the film set had determined that “production failed to call Hannah in to perform her armourer duties and inspect the firearm right before its use” and that had she been called in “this tragedy would have been prevented”.

Rust Movie Productions was fined dollars 136,793 by the New Mexico environment department.

Baldwin’s lawyers say the previously released report “exonerates” the actor as it showed he had “no authority over the matters that were the subject of the bureau’s findings of violations”.

The Times