The elderly father of Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed has welcomed the sudden dismissal of Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter case – and says his daughter’s conviction should now also be overturned.
Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, legendary Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, 81, said Hannah has been made a ‘scapegoat’ over the tragic shooting death of producer Halyna Hutchins, 42, in October 2022.
Reed said: ‘Well, I think that’s good [Baldwin’s dismissal]. I think Hannah’s case should also be dismissed.
‘There’s a lot of evidence that hasn’t been heard at all. They suppressed all the important evidence and I guess [Baldwin’s] attorneys brought it out.’
Legendary Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, 81, said his daughter Hannah’s case should be thrown out after Alec Baldwin’s trial on the same charges was dismissed
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed wipes her tears at her sentencing on April 15, 2024, where she was ordered to serve 18-months in prison
The Rust armorer poses for mugshot after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter
Hannah, 27, was slapped with an 18-month jail sentence in April after being convicted of a single charge of involuntary manslaughter.
She is currently serving her sentence at the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Facility and had been due to be called to the stand to testify in Baldwin’s case.
Reed told DailyMail.com he hopes the tossing of Baldwin’s case will now give his daughter grounds to appeal her own conviction and said she has been made a scapegoat by prosecutors.
He added: ‘It should [be grounds for an appeal]. She didn’t do anything wrong. They’ve absolutely made her a scapegoat.’
Baldwin, 66, had been facing the prospect of almost two years in jail had he been convicted of involuntary manslaughter over Hutchins’ death.
The Ukrainian mom-of-one was shot in the chest during a rehearsal at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just outside of Santa Fe during the filming of Baldwin’s western movie Rust.
Director Joel Souza, 51, was also injured in the incident but made a full recovery.
Harrowing footage shown during Baldwin’s abruptly terminated trial shows the aftermath of the shooting, with Hutchins seen being tended to by medics on set.
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died after being hit by a bullet from the prop gun that Baldwin was handling on the Rust film set in October 2021
Thell Reed said he thought it was ‘good’ that Alec Baldwin’s case was thrown out (pictured reacting with his attorney on Friday), but added that his daughter’s case ‘should also be dismissed’
Baldwin broke down in tears ang hugged his wife Hilaria as his involuntary manslaughter case was sensationally dismissed
Moments before, Baldwin – dressed in full western garb in his role as the eponymous Harland Rust – had been filmed waving around his Pietta .45 Colt pistol.
The replica gun should have contained only blanks but was later found to have had at least one live round inside.
He later claimed that he did not touch the trigger and the gun could only have been fired by ‘sabotage’ although an FBI investigation later revealed the pistol could not be fired half-cocked as Baldwin had claimed.
Hannah, who was working on only her second movie as an armorer at the time, was the first to be charged and later accused of ‘a cascade of safety violations’ by prosecutors in her case.
Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, the same justice who dramatically tossed Baldwin’s case, said at her sentencing that she had turned ‘a safe weapon into a lethal weapon’ by failing to keep live ammunition away from the set.
She added: ‘You were the armorer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone.
‘You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother.’
Photos taken by detectives with Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office show the aftermath of the incident in October 2021
The case was sensationally thrown out on Friday due to a disagreement over bullets admitted into evidence
The actor, 66, grew emotional as he heard that the case against him was being thrown out on Friday
Baldwin holds hands with his wife Hilaria as he exits the courthouse on Friday, moments after his manslaughter case was dismissed by a judge
Halls, who had handed the gun to Baldwin and told him it was ‘cold’, took a plea deal and was slapped with a misdemeanor charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon.
He had also been due to testify against Baldwin and has served six months of unsupervised probation, paid a $500 fine and completed 24 hours of community service.
Baldwin was the final person to face court over Hutchins’ death and, like Hannah, was facing an involuntary manslaughter charge.
He had pled not guilty to the charges in January and day one of the trial in Santa Fe, New Mexico, began with prosecutors accusing him of ‘a reckless disregard for Miss Hutchins’ safety’.
But the trial dramatically collapsed today, with the defense successfully arguing for the case to be dismissed over the prosecution’s failure to share all the evidence with them – specifically bullets brought to them by retired cop Troy Teske who said they were the same type used in Baldwin’s gun.
Baldwin, seen here outside the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s offices on the day of the shooting, was had the charges against him brought twice
Moments before the ruling from the judge, the court heard that one of the two special prosecutors, Erlina Johnson, had quit the case
In her ruling Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said that dismissal with prejudice was a ‘very extreme sanction’, but the threshold had been met.
She said that the ‘suppressed evidence’ had ‘impacted the fundamental fairness of the case’, and that prosecutors were ‘highly culpable’ for the errors and had ‘unilaterally withheld’ the details about the ammunition.
The judge said that the ‘willful withholding of information was intentional and deliberate’, which was ‘so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice’ and there was ‘no way for the court to right this wrong’.
Prosecutor Kari Morrissey countered that they had interviewed Teske last year and were skeptical of him because he is close friends with Reed.
Morrissey said they concluded Teske was sending them on a ‘wild goose chase’ to point the blame at somebody other than Hannah.
She said: ‘It’s a man [Thell Reed] trying to protect his daughter and providing information that doesn’t even match the evidence that was found at the scene’.