Most of Canada to receive emergency alert test today
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
The head of lighting on the film "Rust" filed a lawsuit Wednesday over Alec Baldwin's fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the Western, alleging negligence that caused him "severe emotional distress" that will haunt him forever.
Serge Svetnoy said in the suit that the bullet that killed his close friend Hutchins, narrowly missed him, and he held her head as she died.
"They should never, ever, have had live rounds on this set," Svetnoy's attorney Gary A. Dordick said at a news conference Wednesday.
The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court names nearly two dozen defendants associated with the film including Baldwin, who was both star and a producer; David Halls, the assistant director who handed Baldwin the gun; and Hannah Gutierrez Reed, who was in charge of weapons on the set.
It is the first known lawsuit of what could be many stemming from the Oct. 21 shooting, which also injured "Rust" director Joel Souza.
It was the ninth film that Svetnoy and Hutchins had worked on together, and he had taken the job at low pay because she asked him to.
"She was my friend," Svetnoy said at the news conference.
He said he had seen guns sitting unattended in the dirt a few days earlier in the shoot, and had warned the people responsible about them.
On the day of the shooting, he was setting up lighting within 6 or 7 feet (2 meters) of Baldwin, the suit says.
"What happened next will haunt Plaintiff forever," the suit says. "He felt a strange and terrifying whoosh of what felt like pressurized air from his right. He felt what he believed was gunpowder and other residual materials directly strike the right side of his face."
Then, with his glasses scratched and his hearing muffled, he knelt to help Hutchins, the suit said.
The lawsuit seeks both compensatory and punitive damages to be determined later. It was filed in Los Angeles County because the plaintiff and most of the defendants are based there.
Attorneys and representatives for the defendants did not immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment on the suit.
Gutierrez Reed's lawyer Jason Bowles said in a statement Wednesday that "we are convinced this was sabotage and Hannah is being framed. We believe that the scene was tampered with as well before the police arrived."
Bowles said his client has provided authorities with a full interview and continues to assist them. The statement did not address the lawsuit.
"We are asking for a full and complete investigation of all of the facts, including the live rounds themselves, how they ended up in the 'dummies' box, and who put them in there," the statement said.
Gutierrez Reed said last week that she had inspected the gun Baldwin shot but doesn't know how a live bullet ended up inside.
Santa Fe-area District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said investigators have encountered no proof of sabotage. Her comments, first made on "Good Morning America," were confirmed Wednesday by agency spokeswoman Sascha Guinn Anderson.
Carmack-Altwies says that investigators know who loaded the gun, though it remains unclear how the deadly round of ammunition got on the movie set. The district attorney said she is concerned that there were so many levels of safety failures.
Dordick said at the news conference that it was "far-fetched" to suggest there was sabotage, but that Gutierrez Reed still had the same responsibility to know what was in the gun and who had handled it.
Authorities have said that Halls, the assistant director, handed the weapon to Baldwin and announced "cold gun," indicating that the weapon was safe to use.
Halls said last week that he hoped the tragedy prompted the film industry to "reevaluate its values and practices" to ensure no one is harmed again, but did not provide details.
Baldwin said on video on Oct. 30 that the shooting was a "one-in-a-trillion event" saying, "We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened."
The director Souza told detectives that Baldwin was rehearsing a scene in which he drew a revolver from his holster and pointed it toward the camera, which Hutchins and Souza were behind, according to court records in New Mexico.
Souza said the scene did not call for the use of live rounds, and Gutierrez Reed said real ammo should never have been present, according to the court records.
The Los Angeles lawsuit alleges that the scene did not call for Baldwin to fire the gun at all, only to point it.
Hollywood professionals have been baffled by the circumstances of the movie-set shooting. It already has led to other production crews stepping up safety measures.
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has made headlines with his recent arrival in the U.K., this time to celebrate all things Invictus. But upon the prince landing in the U.K., we have already had confirmation that King Charles III won't have time to see his youngest son during his brief visit.
An Ontario man found out that a line of credit he thought was insured actually isn't after his wife of 50 years died.
Ontario Provincial Police say 64 suspects are facing a combined 348 charges in connection with a series of child sexual exploitation investigations that spanned the province.
After more than a century, Boy Scouts of America is rebranding as Scouting America, another major shakeup for an organization that once proudly resisted change.
The trial of a man who admits he killed four women in Winnipeg is set to begin Wednesday, and a law professor says lawyers for Jeremy Skibicki have multiple hurdles to clear for a defence of mental illness.
An Ontario woman said it would have been impossible to buy a house without her mother – an anecdote that animates the fact that over 17 per cent of Canadian homeowners born in the ‘90s own their property with their parents, according to a new report.
A first-of-its-kind Canadian research study is working towards a major medical breakthrough for a brain disorder, believed to be caused by repeated head injuries, that can only be detected after death.
In March, Indonesian officials and local fishermen rescued 75 people from the overturned hull of a boat off the coast of Indonesia. Until now, little was known about why the boat capsized.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.