Rust Shooting Footage Must Be Removed, According to Halyna Hutchins’ Family

An attorney representing the family wrote to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, claiming that the cinematographer’s husband and son had suffered “irreparable” harm.

The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office released disturbing footage from the tragic Rust shooting earlier this week, which claimed the lives of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. Hutchins’ family, including her husband, Matthew, is demanding that a video taken shortly after she was struck by a projectile fired by Alec Baldwin’s fake gun be taken down from the office’s website.

“Your office trampled on the constitutional rights of the Hutchins” family, attorney Brian Panish wrote in a letter dated April 27 to Sheriff Adan Mendoza, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The damage your office has done is irreparable.” The letter urges the sheriff to withdraw video of Hutchins’s death, which was included in a dump of police interviews, body cam footage, and photographs released to the public on Monday.

According to Panish, victims in New Mexico have the right to see such evidence before it is disseminated to the public. The sheriff’s office allowed the Hutchins family less than one business day to analyse the film, according to the letter. This was “a wholly inadequate amount of time” given the “sheer volume of material,” Panish ruled, leaving the family without the opportunity “to request that discretion be exercised, and sensitive material be redacted.”

“The first time Mr. Hutchins saw the disturbing and unsettling video footage of his dying wife lying on the church floor was on Radar Online, an internet website,” the letter reads. “The potential consequences are disturbing given how information is misused on social media. We fear, for example, that this shocking footage of Andros’ mother dying may be material used by bullies to emotionally abuse him in the future.”

During a Tuesday Good Morning America interview, Mendoza stated that his office was responding to a public records request, and thus “required to release the information…in an effort to be transparent in the investigation.” Vanity Fair has reached out to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office for comment.

The Santa Fe district attorney has not filed any charges. Mendoza indicated on GMA that an inquiry was “nearing completion” and that it will be completed in “weeks, and not months.” Rust manufacturers were fined the highest amount possible by New Mexico’s workplace safety officials last week for gun safety violations. (A representative for the producers claimed at the time that they planned to appeal the ruling.)

Meanwhile, Hutchins’ family is working to have video of her death removed from the internet. “While the damage of publishing the video is irreparable, taking down the video will end your office’s complicity in causing further harm,” the letter states.

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