Attorney for Rust Armorer Claims Someone With ‘Bad Intentions’ Added Live Round to Alec Baldwin’s Gun to ‘Sabotage’ the Film

The attorney for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer for the film Rust, said that Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins could have been the result of a deliberate effort to sabotage the project.

Lawyer Jason Bowles spoke about his client in an interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America Wednesday, and defended her custody over the guns on the Rust filming site. Bowles insisted that Baldwin’s gun was loaded with dummy rounds on the day of the shooting, and that Gutierrez-Reed checked things over with Dave Halls, who is also under scrutiny over the incident:

She did spin the cylinder. She showed Mr. Halls each of the rounds, there were six dummy rounds that she had loaded into that firearm that she believed had been dummy rounds. She did spin it. She did check it. She did by spinning it, by showing it to Mr. Halls, gave it to Mr. Halls. We then know he had the firearm in the church and that firearm then ended up with Mr. Baldwin. It was not given to Mr. Baldwin by Hannah. I believe it went to him through Mr. Halls and that was the chain of custody of that weapon.

Strahan then asked if Gutierrez-Reed knew how a live bullet got loaded into the weapon. Bowles said that remains the biggest question surrounding the case, and he spoke of the safety concerns reported from the set, including that other live rounds were recovered by investigators.

“There was a box labeled ‘dummy rounds’ that Hannah had been pulling from, she knew were dummy rounds,” Bowles said. That’s when he suggested someone tampered with the ammo:

Somebody put that live round or live rounds in that box. When you do that, you can only have bad intentions because you’re going to confuse the rounds if you’re the armorer and they appear very similarly. The dummy rounds look like a regular live round…We’re afraid that could have been what happened here, that somebody intended to sabotage this set with a live round intentionally placed in a box of dummies.

Strahan called that “a very serious allegation” as he asked Bowles if he had any evidence to support that claim. Bowles referred back to the live rounds mixed in with the box of dummies, and “we know Hannah did not put the live rounds in that box. We know the live rounds shouldn’t have been in that box, but they were.”

“There can be very few explanations for why live rounds end up in a box of dummy prop ammunition on a movie set, and one of them is that somebody wants to go into a firearm and wants there to be an incident on the set. There is no other reason to mix a live round with the dummies. There’s just none.”

Watch above, via ABC.