Six months after Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the movie “Rust,” raising questions about who was culpable and how live ammunition got onto the set, the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office said Monday it still lacked key pieces of evidence, including ballistics analysis, that it said it needed to complete its criminal investigation.
The cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, was shot and killed in New Mexico on Oct. 21 during the rehearsal for a scene that required Mr. Baldwin to draw a replica old-fashioned revolver from a shoulder holster that he had been told contained no live ammunition.
The gun went off, discharging a bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins and injured Joel Souza, the film’s director. Since then, the sheriff’s office in Santa Fe has been gathering evidence and investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
But the sheriff’s office said it still lacked important building blocks of its investigation to be able to pass the case to the Santa Fe County district attorney for review.
Sheriff Adan Mendoza said in a statement that “various components of the investigation remain outstanding,” including firearm and ballistic forensics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, DNA and latent fingerprint analysis, a report from the New Mexico Medical Examiner’s office and the analysis of Mr. Baldwin’s phone data, which was extracted by investigators in Suffolk County, N.Y.
“Once these investigative components are provided to the sheriff’s office, we will be able to complete the investigation to forward it to the Santa Fe district attorney for review,” Sheriff Mendoza said in a statement issued by his office.
The Santa Fe County sheriff’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on what was delaying the outstanding pieces of evidence.
Despite months of gathering evidence, no findings have been made public, and it still remains unclear how live bullets found their way onto the film set and how one of them got into the gun that Mr. Baldwin was handling.
The sheriff’s office took the step of releasing its files relating to the “Rust” investigation, but the documents quickly became inaccessible because of high traffic to the website. The office said the files included witness interviews, deputies’ and detectives’ lapel and dash camera footage, and crime scene photos.
The sheriff’s office said it still lacked analysis of the data from Mr. Baldwin’s phone, which he turned over to the police in Suffolk County in January.
Mr. Baldwin agreed to a process in which he handed over his iPhone and its password, and the phone’s data would be reviewed by officials from the Suffolk County police department and district attorney’s office before the relevant data would be passed to the authorities in New Mexico.
Last week, New Mexico state regulators faulted the producers of the movie, finding that the film management’s indifference to dangers involved in handling guns on set had led to the death of Ms. Hutchins, and they issued a $136,793 penalty on the production company, the maximum allowed under state law.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
