Alec Baldwin said he still doesn’t know how a live round was loaded into the gun in the fatal on-set shooting that killed a crew member this fall and insisted that he did not actually fire the weapon.
He gave his account to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in his first extended, on-camera interview since the deadly incident.
It’s been six weeks since a prop gun in Baldwin’s hands went off, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding director Joel Souza, 48, on the set of the Western movie “Rust” in New Mexico.
In a clip of the interview made public Wednesday afternoon, Baldwin said he still doesn’t know how a live round was loaded into the gun and insisted that he did not actually fire it.
“Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger,” he said in the interview clip released Wednesday. “No, no, no, I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never.”
Immediately after the Oct. 21 shooting, much of the attention fell on assistant director Dave Halls, who had yelled “cold gun” on the “Rust” set before he gave Baldwin the weapon, indicating incorrectly that it didn’t have any live rounds, investigators said in a search warrant affidavit.
Halls’ attorney, Lisa Torraco, has maintained that her client didn’t hand the gun to Baldwin and that checking to see whether it was loaded wasn’t the assistant director’s responsibility.
In an interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Torraco said Halls has been telling her for weeks that Baldwin didn’t pull the trigger on the “Rust” set.
“Since Day One, he thought it was a misfire,” Torraco said. “And until Alec said that, it was really hard to believe but Dave has told me since the very first day I met him that Alec did not pull that trigger.”
No one has been arrested or criminally charged in connection with the shooting, which is being investigated by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
A spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office told NBC News Thursday morning that his agency would not discuss Baldwin’s interview.
After the shooting, the district attorney for Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said pressing charges could be a challenge.
She told NBC News that any potential charge tied to an “involuntary killing” would need “to show the willful disregard for the safety of others.”
“And so at this point, we are trying to figure out, should it become a criminal investigation? Should it become more of a civil investigation? So it’s an investigation,” Carmack-Altwies said a week after the killing.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
