The district attorney stopped on the shoulder of the road. “The first text was, ‘There’s been a potential homicide on a movie set.’ I started scrolling through, and it was people from my office saying, ‘Alec Baldwin has shot two people.’ Truly, I was like, ‘What…? This cannot be right.’ ”
The basic details of what happened on the set of Rust are well known: A gun held by Baldwin during a scene rehearsal on the Bonanza Creek Ranch went off, firing an actual bullet through cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’s upper body and into writer-director Joel Souza’s shoulder. Souza was wounded but survived. Hutchins did not. Witnesses in sheriff’s documents describe her bleeding on the floor of the church set, panicked and baffled. The accounts of her suffering are excruciating.
Despite all we now know, crucial questions persist. Chief among them are: How did this happen, and who is actually responsible? The answers won’t be clear-cut. This is a case in which Baldwin, the person holding the gun, may not be directly to blame for Hutchins’s death. Still, even if he had never touched the weapon, he is one of the many producers on a film now under suspicion for recklessness and disregard.
As D.A., Carmack-Altwies must determine whether the errors involved rise to the level of criminality. Her work began on the side of that road in New Mexico with a flurry of text replies and calls. “I turned around and came back,” she says. “I assigned one of my chief deputies to basically embed with the sheriff’s department to help with any warrants they needed, any legal questions. And then I spoke to the major who was initially in charge, going back and forth on some different investigatory tools that they could use. We were basically all hands on deck.” Carmack-Altwies’s first priority as a prosecutor was to ensure that any evidence the sheriff’s office uncovered remained admissible in court. “I’m sure we drove them crazy, because it was four lawyers reviewing a search warrant, and each one of us had ‘Oh, you need to add this’ and ‘Oh, I wouldn’t put this in.’ ”
Carmack-Altwies will never meet Hutchins, but they had much in common. They were both 42, and both were embarking on new, higher-level challenges in their work. Both were married; both were mothers. “Halyna had a son that is my son’s age, and just thinking about my son, and that little boy being without a mom, was really upsetting,” says the district attorney. “So I definitely hugged him too much that weekend, and then I came into work on Monday, and we started talking about strategy and what we needed to do to make sure that this case was treated with the utmost professionalism and respect that it deserved—that all homicide victims deserve.”
Hutchins’s union, Local Cinematographers Guild 600, has compiled tributes from friends and colleagues, who remember her as someone who loved to joke and dance but was also a relentless fighter for her work and an ever-replenishing source of energy. (Even the cinematographer’s website biography has a droll, self-effacing touch: “Originally from Ukraine, Halyna grew up on a Soviet military base in the Arctic Circle surrounded by reindeer and nuclear submarines.”) The day after her death, Hutchins’s husband, Matt, posted a photo of her with their son, hiking along a creek. “Halyna inspired us all with her passion and vision, and her legacy is too meaningful to encapsulate in words,” he wrote. “Our loss is enormous….”
Hutchins studied journalism at Kyiv National University and began her film career working on documentaries in Europe. She then devoted her focus to cinematography, graduating from the American Film Institute in 2015, and made splashes at Cannes in 2017 with the sultry thriller Snowbound and at SXSW in 2019 with the fright-fest Darlin’. American Cinematographer magazine named Hutchins one of its “rising stars” in 2019, and she was fulfilling that promise. Rust was supposed to be the next step in her life, not the end of it.
In late February, the D.A.’s office expects to receive a forensics report
proc. by movies
