Finalist: Staff of the Los Angeles Times

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By Meg James

Neal W. Zoromski has spent three decades in Hollywood, working on movies big and small, but never on a western. So he was thrilled last month when he was asked to join the crew of an Alec Baldwin film in New Mexico.

The veteran prop master immediately told “Rust” production managers that he was interested in the job that would give him responsibility for the accoutrements of the Old West. Pistols, rifles, wagons, saddles and flour sacks were needed to re-create 1880s Kansas for Baldwin, who was playing a grizzled outlaw named Harland Rust.

But during four days of informal discussions with film managers, Zoromski said he got a “bad feeling.”

“There were massive red flags,” he said in an interview Sunday with The Times.

He said he felt that “Rust” was too much of a slapdash production, one with an overriding focus on saving money instead of a concern for people’s safety. Production managers didn’t seem to value experience and were brushing off his questions, he said.

Zoromski ultimately told “Rust” production managers that he would take a pass.

“After I pressed ‘send’ on that last email, I felt, in the pit of my stomach: ‘That is an accident waiting to happen,’” he said.

Last Thursday, Baldwin fatally shot 42-year-old cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in the chest with a prop gun while rehearsing a gunfight scene inside a wooden church at the Bonanza Creek Ranch movie set near Santa Fe, N.M.

Baldwin, who also is a producer on the film, was practicing removing his revolver from its holster and aiming it toward the camera. “Rust” director Joel Souza, who also was injured, told a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s detective that he heard “what sounded like a whip and then a loud pop.”

Hutchins, a rising star in the industry, crumpled over, and fellow crew members struggled to treat her wound. She was later airlifted about 50 miles away to an Albuquerque hospital, where she was pronounced dead. She left behind a husband and 9-year-old son.

Production has been shut down, and Santa Fe County Sheriff’s deputies and the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau are investigating the accident.

Tensions were boiling on set. On Thursday, the 12th day of a 21-day production, union camera operators and their assistants had walked off the job to protest working conditions. Nonunion camera operators were brought in, and the switch put the director behind schedule. The assistant director had yelled at the script supervisor during lunch, according to a copy of the 911 recording.

Days earlier, a camera operator had reported two accidental gun discharges during a rehearsal in a cabin. “This is super unsafe,” the camera operator wrote in a text message to the production manager, The Times reported Friday.

The tragedy occurred amid a boisterous debate within Zoromski’s union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, over whether to go on strike to seek better pay and improved conditions on film and TV sets.

The “Rust” producers late last week released a statement: “The safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions and everyone associated with the company. Though we were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set, we will be conducting an internal review of our procedures while production is shut down. We will continue to cooperate with the Santa Fe authorities in their investigation and offer mental health services to the cast and crew during this tragic time.”

Now, Zoromski, who lives in Los Angeles, is haunted by Hutchins’ death. He believes that had he accepted the “Rust” job, things would have turned out differently.

“I take my job incredibly seriously,” he said. “As the prop master, you have to be concerned about safety. I’m the guy who hands the guns to the people on set.”

Zoromski, 57, didn’t grow up wanting to be in the movie business. Born in New Zealand, he traveled around the world with his adopted parents before moving, at age 5, with his mother to Rhode Island. He graduated from Boston College with a biochemistry degree.

He had planned a career in the pharmaceutical industry, but he was in need of a job. He worked at a restaurant in L.A., in retail, and then at a cutthroat commercial real estate brokerage on the West Side.

Finally, a friend steered him to Roger Corman’s B-movie studio, where he was hired to work as an art department assistant. His first day on the job, he was sent to a horse barn where they were shooting the 1990 film “The Haunting of Morella.” The barn was dilapidated, and tiny cracks between wall timbers allowed sunlight to seep in and ruin the camera lighting.

An art director ordered Zoromski to stuff hay into the cracks to block out the sun. He spent the day meticulously gluing hay strands to fill the seams between the boards. The art director was impressed with his diligence, and he was hired.

Zoromski then worked on TV movies and music videos with Paula Abdul, Madonna and Guns N’ Roses before moving to feature films.

He’s worked on several major productions, including in the props department on Roland Emmerich’s 2004 “Day After Tomorrow,” with Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid. He was prop master for Jason Reitman’s 2005 film, “Thank You for Smoking.”

It was 9 p.m. Sept. 20 when the “Rust” production manager, Row Walters, reached out to see if Zoromski was interested in becoming the props master for the film. An hour later, Zoromski replied via email that he was “very interested.” The two sides engaged in conversations throughout that week.

But Zoromski later changed his mind, citing several concerns.

He said he felt that “Rust” production managers were being “evasive” when he asked about specific terms of his potential employment. The budget, estimated at about $7 million, seemed too small for the type of film the producers were attempting to make. He couldn’t get an answer on the budget for his “kit,” industry jargon for his cache of props needed to stock the set.

He said he also became alarmed because it was just two weeks before “Rust” was set to begin filming in New Mexico and the producers hadn’t yet hired a prop master. Typically, those decisions are made weeks, even months, before the cameras roll.

“In the movies, the prep is everything. ...You also need time to clean, inspect and repair guns,” he said. “You need time to fix old clocks. In period films, you are sometimes using antiques. But here, there was absolutely no time to prepare, and that gave me a bad feeling.”

And the deal breaker?

Zoromski said he initially asked for a department of five technicians. He was told that “Rust” was a low-budget production and that plans were to use items from a local prop house. He modified his request to have at least two experienced crew members: one to serve as an assistant prop master and the other as an armorer, or gun wrangler, dedicated to making sure the weapons were safe, oiled and functioning properly.

But the “Rust” producers insisted that only one person was needed to handle both tasks.

“You never have a prop assistant double as the armorer,” Zoromski said. “Those are two really big jobs.”

Walters, the production manager, sent Zoromski an email Sept. 24 that read: “We’d really like one of the assistants to be the armorer that can push up on the gunfights and heavy armor days,” according to a copy of the email shared with The Times. (Walters did not respond to requests for comment.)

Zoromski replied: “Unfortunately, I have to pass on this opportunity. I am grateful for your interest and wish nothing but the very best for you, your crew and the show.”

Three days later, 24-year-old Hannah Gutierrez-Reed announced on Facebook that she had a new gig on a film in Santa Fe, according to a screen shot of a recent social media post, which was shared with The Times. She’d landed the job as the “property key assistant/armorer” on “Rust,” according to the production notes.

Now, questions are being raised about Gutierrez-Reed’s experience and her performance on the job. Gutierrez-Reed had worked as head armorer on only one other production before “Rust.”

According to search warrants, she left three weapons on a rolling cart outside the church setting at midday Thursday. Souza, the film’s director, told a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office investigator that multiple people had been handling the guns and that he wasn’t sure whether anyone had checked them for safety after the group came back from lunch.

Staff writer Amy Kaufman contributed to this report.

By Josh Rottenberg

For consumers, today’s entertainment landscape can look like a kind of digital nirvana, an endless all-you-can-eat buffet in which every form of diversion imaginable is just a click away.

Last week’s tragic death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust” — coming just days after a threatened strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees nearly brought the industry to a halt — has exposed a stark reality.

To many film workers, particularly those on lower-budget projects, Hollywood’s dream factory is too often beginning to feel more like a sweatshop. With the business models that long sustained the independent film world crumbling, they say Hutchins’ death, coupled with reports of labor tensions and lax safety standards on the “Rust” set, is the byproduct of an ailing system that is increasingly putting lives at risk in the pursuit of shrinking profits.

“The predicament we’re in makes you think of Upton Sinclair,” said director Adam Egypt Mortimer, who worked with Hutchins on last year’s low-budget sci-fi superhero film “Archenemy.” “There is a continuum from the way that a crew is treated on a project like this to the way people working in warehouses at Amazon are treated. There’s this amount of money that’s not going to the safety and well-being of the laborers, and their labor is being converted into the product. We can’t keep grinding people down.”

Speaking to hundreds of film workers at a candlelight vigil for Hutchins in Burbank on Sunday evening, IATSE Vice President Michael Miller noted sadly that Hutchins’ death came just seven years after camera assistant Sarah Jones was struck and killed by a freight train on a trestle in Georgia during the filming of another low-budget feature, “Midnight Rider,” whose director, Randall Miller, pleaded guilty to criminal trespass and involuntarily manslaughter charges and served a year in prison before his release.

”The circumstances are not identical, but they are way too familiar,” Michael Miller said. “The idea that there isn’t time for safety is just wrong. The concept that schedule is more important than safety or that the budget is more important than people is one that simply cannot be allowed to persist. If you’re on a set and your crews are telling you that it’s not safe, listen to that.”

Major studios said they have taken important steps to address complaints from workers about unsafe working conditions on sets. An alliance representing the leading production companies — including Walt Disney, WarnerMedia and Netflix — recently negotiated a proposed contract with IATSE that is intended to reduce long hours on sets. The deal, for example, includes for the first time 54-hour breaks over weekends, but has garnered mixed reviews among some union members.

Although film- and TV-related deaths have declined in recent decades, thanks in part to the expanded use of digital effects to replace dangerous physical stunts, Hutchins’ and Jones’ deaths are not the only high-profile on-set fatalities in recent years. In 2015, two crew members of the Tom Cruise movie “American Made” died in a plane crash during production. Two years later, stuntman John Bernecker died from injuries sustained while filming a scene for “The Walking Dead.” Also in 2017, stuntwoman Joi “S.J.” Harris perished during a motorcycle stunt on “Deadpool 2.”

Since Hutchins’ death, questions have swirled about whether guns on the set of “Rust” were handled properly, with attention centered on the inexperience of armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed.

Santa Fe County, N.M., authorities said Wednesday that the projectile that fatally wounded Hutchins was a lead bullet, one of roughly 500 rounds of ammunition recovered from the set.

The film’s production company, Rust Movie Productions, said Friday in a statement that it was “not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set,” and that it would be conducting an internal review.

“The safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions and everyone associated with the company,” the company said. “We will continue to cooperate with the Santa Fe authorities in their investigation and offer mental health services to the cast and crew during this tragic time.”

In the days since, film and TV productions have begun to reconsider the use of real weapons on set and a California state lawmaker called for an outright ban on firearms on sets.

But some argue the focus on guns misses the bigger picture.

“The discussion around on-set firearms is valuable,” director James Gunn, who directed small-scale genre fare before graduating to big-budget spectacles such as Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” wrote Sunday on Twitter. “But my fear is it’s now obscuring discussing the many ways dozens have died or been grievously injured on movie sets because of irresponsibility, ignoring safety protocols, improper leadership & a set culture of mindless rushing.”

Speaking to The Times at Hutchins’ vigil, set medic Margarita Velona said that the true toll of long hours and short turnarounds on sets can be found in the sorts of near misses and everyday mishaps that don’t make headlines.

“I’ve had to take care of somebody because they fell asleep at the wheel on the way to work,” Velona said. “The extreme hours kick your butt by the end of the week. We don’t see our families. If you just took a couple more days and added it to your budget, you wouldn’t have to treat us that way. Instead they just bring in a coffee truck.”

With the cratering of art house theatrical distribution, which has only accelerated since the pandemic began, the already ailing independent film business has been further weakened, putting greater downward pressure on production budgets.

Once thriving independents such as Open Road Films, Overture Films and Alchemy are gone. In some cases, private equity firms have scooped up the libraries. The international distribution market has virtually collapsed, and ready sources of financing have dried up.

Yet as the theatrical marketplace for independent films has evaporated, the supply has not slowed. If anything, it has only increased, fueled by a proliferation of new digital platforms and by deep-pocketed streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon with an insatiable appetite for ever more content.

Lured by what they see as a streaming gold rush, new would-be producers have entered the business and attempted to mount ambitious productions often without the experience, relationships or understanding of film-set culture required.

Among the entities behind “Rust” is Streamline Global, a company founded in 2017 whose website compares feature films to “acquiring an aircraft” in terms of its “tax benefits in the form of bonus depreciation or tax credits.”

Producer Rebecca Green, whose credits include 2015’s low-budget horror hit “It Follows,” recently helped form the Producers Union, a collective bargaining organization pushing for fair wages and labor rights for indie producers.

“The dilution of the producer credit over the last two decades absolutely has something to do with this tragedy,” said Green, the union’s president. “There are so many vanity credits: Directors are producers, actors are producers, financiers are producers. But who is the person that actually knows how to properly run a set? I think it’s getting harder and harder to pinpoint that.”

Matt Miller, who runs the independent production studio Vanishing Angle, said that producers need to understand how to work within budget restrictions without sacrificing professionalism or the welfare of the cast and crew.

On the upcoming darkly comic thriller “The Beta Test,” which had a relatively tiny budget of less than $300,000, the production still hired an intimacy advisor to make sure that the actors felt safe performing scenes with sexual activity, he said.

“It’s really about trying to encourage a community culture to show that there’s a better way to treat people,” Miller said. “You don’t have to have crazy long days, and you don’t have to do things unsafely. You don’t even have to do it altruistically. Do it because you’re going to get a better product and it’s going to make your next movie better because the crews will want to work with you again.”

In the end, though, Green said the way to create safer, more humane film sets may simply be to have fewer of them.

“Nobody wants to accept that there’s now a very, very small place for independent film,” Green said. “We are churning out a high level of content that has no place to go. What really should happen is we don’t make as many movies and TV series, and we make them correctly. That’s what needs to happen in order for this to change. But I don’t know that the powers that be are willing to do that.”

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

By Meg James, Amy Kaufman, Julia Wick

SANTA FE, N.M.  — “What the f— just happened?”

Alec Baldwin repeated the words again and again with growing urgency as the sound of the shot reverberated throughout the wooden church.

Mere seconds before, the actor had been preparing to film a scene in which he, as a grizzled 1880s Kansas outlaw, becomes involved in a shootout in a church. He was just going through the motions, giving the camera crew a chance to line up their angles.

“So,” he had said, placing his hand on the Colt .45 revolver in its holster, “I guess I’m gonna take this out, pull it, and go, ‘Bang!’”

No projectile was supposed to be in the firearm. Just a dummy round that contained no gunpowder. Baldwin was simply showing the director and the cinematographer of “Rust,” a low-budget indie western film, what he was going to do when cameras began rolling.

Instead, he shot them.

A lead bullet flew out of the weapon Baldwin had been assured was a “cold gun.” It hit cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who stumbled back, falling into the arms of the head electrician. As she was laid to the ground, she could see the blood pouring from her chest. Behind her director Joel Souza was also down, clutching his shoulder; the bullet had gone through Hutchins’ body into his.

“What the f— was that? That burns!” Souza screamed.

Baldwin put the gun down on a church pew. He looked down in horror at his two injured colleagues, repeating his initial question like a mantra.

“Medic!” someone yelled, as various crew members huddled around Hutchins, trying to stanch the bleeding. A boom operator looked into her eyes. “Oh, that was no good,” the sound guy said.

“No,” Hutchins replied. “That was no good. That was no good at all.”

Within hours, she would be pronounced dead.

On Oct. 21, at 1:49 p.m., Santa Fe County emergency crews were summoned to Bonanza Creek Ranch in response to a shooting that would leave the entertainment industry reeling. Hollywood loves nothing more than a good war story, a tale of the difficult conditions that a cast and crew face, the daring chance a director took to get the take, the film made on a shoestring budget that becomes an unexpected hit.

But this was no war story; this was every filmmaker’s worst nightmare. A “one-in-a-trillion episode” is how Baldwin described it to paparazzi who’d tracked him down Saturday, a week later, in a small Vermont town.

“There are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time, but nothing like this,” he told the photographers Saturday. “We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”

The death of Halyna Hutchins and wounding of Souza came just a few days after Hollywood’s crews union had threatened to strike if producers didn’t take their concerns about safety seriously, and left everyone echoing the question Baldwin had cried into the chaos.

How did this happen? What had gone wrong?

Detectives are still investigating key questions, including who loaded live ammunition in the FD Pietta Colt .45 that Baldwin fired.

“I think there was some complacency on the set, and I think there are some safety issues that need to be addressed by the industry and possibly by the state of New Mexico,” Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said last week at a news conference.

Mendoza said that New Mexico 1st Judicial Dist. Atty. Mary Carmack-Altwies would determine whether to bring charges in the case.

A Los Angeles Times reconstruction of the events leading up to Hutchins’ death has uncovered new details about that Thursday, and the days leading up to the shooting in that wooden church about 13 miles south of Santa Fe. As has been previously reported by The Times, the inexperience of the armorer had raised concerns from the first day on set, as did conflicts between the production managers and the camera crew. A cascade of bad decisions appeared to create a set chaotic even by its low-budget status. A set in which, against all production regulations, live bullets were not only present but several had been loaded into a prop gun.

“The safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions and everyone associated with the company, “ Rust Movie Productions said in a statement the day after Hutchins’ death. “Though we were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set, we will be conducting an internal review of our procedures while production is shut down.”

This report is based on interviews with 14 “Rust” crew members, including nine who were at Bonanza Creek Ranch the day Hutchins was shot, records from Santa Fe County, Santa Fe film permits and emails, text messages and internal communications from the “Rust” production. It is the most comprehensive account to date of a day that ended in tragedy, and raised concerns about the decisions made regarding safety on the set. Already, there have been calls for new laws and regulations regarding the handling of firearms on sets.

Most crew members who spoke with The Times asked to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. Scenes described in this article were based on the accounts of at least two people, unless otherwise noted. Two members of the “Rust” camera crew provided on-the-record interviews.

“It always felt like the budget was more important than crew members,” Lane Luper, the A-camera first assistant, said Saturday in an interview with The Times. “Every thing was about the schedule and the budget.”

At 6:10 a.m. on Oct. 21, the first camera assistant operators and technicians for the film “Rust” began arriving at Bonanza Creek Ranch. It was the 12th day of the 21-day film production.

Other crew members who had parked their cars near base camp, about half a mile from the security gate, had already lined up in the catering tent. Standing in the 37-degree cold, early arrivals got their breakfast sandwiches in the dark. The crust on the bread was so hard that it broke off. But at least there was food available; it had been known to run out some days.

The camera crew skipped the meal, figuring it would be tacky to eat given their pending resignations. The camera operators went straight to the trucks near the edge of the set. After more than a week of wrangling with the film’s producers over working conditions and safety, six members of the camera team were about to walk off the set.

Bonanza Creek Ranch is a 1,000-plus-acre high desert spread near the site of an old silver mining ghost town, Bonanza City, which dried up a few years after its formation in 1880.

Since the early 1950s, the privately owned site has been a popular destination for movie production. Jimmy Stewart’s 1955 “The Man from Laramie” was filmed there. Paul Newman flirted with Katharine Ross near a ranch barn in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

Bonanza Creek Ranch was also where Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the 24-year-old armorer on “Rust,” fell in love with film. Her dad, an industry-renowned gun expert, brought his daughter, then in the fifth grade, to the location when he worked on the 2007 outlaw flick “3:10 to Yuma.”

In this part of New Mexico, yellow signs directing crew to productions have become as much a part of the landscape as the scrubby green sagebrush. Many members of the New Mexico-based crew for “Rust” live in Albuquerque, nearly 50 miles away.

Early on, camera operators — members of the IATSE Locals 600 and 480 — asked the film’s Atlanta-based production managers for hotel rooms. They didn’t want to spend an extra two hours driving to and from Albuquerque on Interstate 25, a rural four-lane highway with a 75-mph speed limit.

They had been assured hotel rooms would be provided, and during the first week of production, rooms were available to those who wanted them.

But, at the start of the second week, camera crew members were told they would no longer receive hotel rooms, according to Luper, who was the camera crew department head. Others from production were moved to the Coyote South, a former Super 8 motel, where rooms go for about $55 a night. Luper and another crew member were each given a night’s stay at another hotel during the second week of production, he said.

Late Saturday, a spokeswoman for the producers said hotel rooms were provided to camera operators and other crew members. But, she said, IATSE’s contract requires producers provide rooms only if workers spent more than 13 hours a day on the job — or if an individual crew member lived more than 60 miles away. The Albuquerque crew members lived 49 to 54 miles from set.

During the second week of production, producers consulted with the IATSE Local 600 shop steward, who wrote in an Oct. 13 email that the accommodations being offered seemed “fair,” said a person close to the production.

Luper discussed the hotel situation with Hutchins over dinner Oct. 15; she treated Luper and others to sushi. She said the issue had been resolved; Hutchins had forfeited a day’s rental of a technocrane, which enables photographers to get aerial shots, to expand the budget for lodging.

Other concerns plagued “Rust” from its inception. Crew members were not being paid, Luper said, and many described an overly rushed mentality on the set. Even production managers expressed concern about the capabilities of the set’s sole armorer, Gutierrez Reed.

She was responsible for all the guns on set and had worked as head armorer on only one film previously. Unit production manager Katherine “Row” Walters felt that “apparently props and armor require handholding,” according to a screenshot of an internal Oct. 8 Slack message.

Before Hutchins was killed, crew members say, there were three accidental discharges of weapons on set. Baldwin’s stunt double had accidentally fired a blank after being told that his gun was “cold.” A young woman from the props department “actually shot herself in the foot,” Luper said, adding that the round was a blank.

According to her attorneys, Gutierrez Reed “fought for training, days to maintain weapons and proper time to prepare for gunfire, but ultimately was overruled by production and her department... The whole production set became unsafe due to various factors, including lack of safety meetings.”

There had been other red flags. There was no medic on-site during pre-production; a medic’s presence is standard practice in the film industry when crew members are constructing sets. A spokesman for 3rd Shift Media, which was running the unit production, declined to comment.

“Somebody dropped a countersink bit and it stabbed me in the hand. I had to take care of it myself and I’m still healing from it,” one person said, describing an accident that occurred while constructing the hanging gallows on set.

Once filming began, Luper and other crew noted that safety bulletins were not sent out with call sheets, despite that also being standard practice in Hollywood. The producers’ spokeswoman said there were notations on the “call sheet” that referenced the guns to be used that day.

Tensions continued to build. The Sunday before the fatal shooting, the schedule had run from noon to midnight. The film permit dictated that there be “no significant disturbance of terrain and/or vegetation” on the chaparral-covered arroyo, so the crew had to haul heavy equipment — one piece weighing 140 pounds — through a tight area where vehicles were not allowed. The afternoon sun was punishing. Gusts of wind pelted their gear with fine powdery dirt.

The camera crew stayed until 1:30 a.m. gathering their equipment, which was scattered around the site. Then they had an hour-long drive home. One camera assistant spent part of the night in his car in the parking lot, Luper said.

On Wednesday, that camera assistant, who lives in Albuquerque, requested a hotel room. The issue is a sensitive one for camera operators because they typically have to spend 30 minutes to an hour after “wrap time,” gathering and cleaning the cameras. During a separate film project in 2018, Luper said he had fallen asleep behind the wheel.

When he was told no, the tension hit a breaking point.

“We said: ‘OK, they really don’t care about us,’” Jonas Huerta, a digital utility technician, said.

In fact, within the “Rust” production office, the request for hotel rooms for crew members had been treated as a joke. So much so that someone on the production staff had ordered custom black long-sleeve T-shirts, with “Error 404: Housing Not Found” and “ABQ is an hour away” printed on them. A photo of the shirts, which someone with knowledge of the situation said arrived at the production office Thursday morning, was shared with The Times.

None of this was known to the camera crew, five of whom composed emails to Walters late Wednesday night saying they intended to resign.

Walters did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“I have to wake up early and commute to set, my job is very physically demanding and I am beyond exhausted by the time I wrap,” Huerta wrote in his email to Walters. “I’ve found myself nodding off or having to take micro naps on the roadside just to get home safe.”

His safety concerns also extended to the weapons on set.

“I also feel anxious on set, I’ve seen firsthand our [assistant director] rush to get shots and he skips over important protocols,” Huerta wrote in his email. “ He often rushes to shoot, I’ve had more than a few occasions where I have been close to the weapons being fired with no regards to my hearing. Sometimes he rushes so quickly that props [department] hasn’t even had the chance to bring earplugs and he rolls and the actors fire anyway.”

Huerta’s email was sent Wednesday at 9:15 p.m.

“If it wasn’t for the hotel, we would have stuck it out,” he told The Times.

At 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, having skipped their breakfast, the “Rust” camera crew hopped into the 10-ton truck that contained all the camera equipment, separating their personal equipment from the gear that had been rented by the production managers. They worked more than an hour to disassemble cameras, monitors and carts.

Hutchins, the cinematographer, and Dave Halls, the first assistant director, arrived.

Hutchins seemed confused that her camera crew was packing up. She was under the impression the hotel room issue had been resolved.

“We felt bad leaving because of Halyna,” one of the camera technicians recalled. “I was torn. We all really liked her.”

Hutchins tearfully gave Luper a big bearhug. “I feel like I’m losing my best friends,” she told him.

But they were not moving quickly enough for Gabrielle Pickle, the line producer in charge of production. She was the last to join producers who were standing in a semi-circle behind the truck, arms folded, watching the technicians pack up their gear.

Sometime around 7:50 a.m., Pickle ordered the camera crew “to work faster,” Huerta said. She pointed at Luper and said: “You need to get off the property immediately, or I will call security,” Luper recalled.

The sun was now up, and four replacement camera operators, including three non-union ones, had been trickling in. At least two looked like “they were fresh out of high school,” Luper said.

Halls ushered Hutchins away, saying they needed to go prepare for the first morning shot.

The Ukrainian-born cinematographer had forged an unlikely path to Hollywood, working as an investigative journalist on British documentary productions before turning to film. She graduated from the prestigious American Film Institute Conservatory in 2015 and was named as one of American Cinematographer’s Rising Stars four years later. At 42, she appeared on the cusp of a breakout career.

“Did you hear camera walked?” someone whispered to a friend as people clustered around heaters in the cold. The group’s actual exit had happened quietly, with no public scene, and some crew members didn’t realize anything had happened. The only difference some of the actors noticed was that just one camera was being used to film them.

The first setup of the day required only a single camera. But the staging was complicated, with all the main cast, save for Baldwin, riding horses together into the old western town. Setting it up took longer than expected.

Around 8 a.m., everyone gathered in the middle of the faux western town for a safety meeting.

“It was no different from any other safety meeting, and no different from a safety meeting I’d expect to have on a film like this,” an attendee recalled.

When filming began, Hutchins was positioned right in the middle of the road, her eyes glued to the monitor.

“I can’t imagine what it was like for Halyna to have to continue with what she did and keep a positive attitude,” a crew member said of that morning.

Baldwin’s call time was 7:54 a.m.

He liked to drive himself to set with his assistant in the passenger seat. The actor was a feared-but-respected presence on set, and crew members said the energy shifted whenever he arrived. Everyone tried to stay out of his eye line, lest they be a distraction.

Filming moved into the wooden church in the late morning for a handful of setups. After the last establishing shot of Baldwin was in the can, lunch was called.

Actors remained in costume in the giant catering tent, taking great care not to spill any of the Thai noodles on their frontier-style clothes as they ate. (Though the good thing about a western, one said, was that if you did get some food on your pants, you could always just rub it in and hope it passed for dirt.)

The meat of the day’s filming, including a shootout that would require pyrotechnics and smoke, was scheduled after the meal break.

After the meal, property master Sarah Zachry retrieved the guns that would be needed for the scene from a truck, where the weapons were stored inside a locked safe. The ammunition was also in the truck, but had been left unsecured on a cart during the break, according to a search warrant affidavit filed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Oct. 27.

Baldwin had taken pains to make his gun work look realistic. A few days earlier, he’d gone into the church to walk through what it would be like to use the weapon in the scene. The live rounds he fired contained blanks, but still made enough noise that crew members were startled.

“Alec was pretty concerned about safety on set,” said another camera technician.

“He wanted to know where I would be standing when he drew his gun,” this person said. “I told him I was going to be standing in a different place, and he said, ‘Good.’”

That Thursday, the crew began preparing for the scene before Baldwin had returned from his lunch break. Gutierrez Reed entered the church with the firearms, performing a safety check with the Colt .45 in front of Halls. He thought he saw three rounds inside the gun, but he did not check them before taking the weapon in his hand.

He told investigators that “he should have checked all of them, but didn’t, and couldn’t recall if she spun the drum,” according to the affidavit.

The armorer left the church.

No stand-in performers were on site, so the first assistant director ran through Baldwin’s blocking himself, pulling the gun three times. Russell, a B-Cam operator, watched the action unfold from a monitor on his dolly. Hutchins stood over his shoulder, flanked by Souza.

Because of the walkout, the team was working with fewer monitors than usual. The 10-inch screen in video village wasn’t great quality, so the filmmakers opted to review the optics on the dolly’s monitor, which was seven inches but had higher resolution.

During the scene, Baldwin’s character was supposed to fast-draw his weapon and shoot at a rival. Halls had not pulled the gun’s trigger during the run-throughs he performed.

But when Baldwin entered the church to do a quick rehearsal, he apparently did.

The bullet barely missed Russell before hitting the DP and the director. The trio was about two feet from the muzzle of the weapon.

A dummy round, which contains no gunpowder and doesn’t fire, would look nearly identical to a bullet when the camera peered down the barrel of the revolver Baldwin was holding, with none of the lethal capabilities.

If the rounds had been checked as they went into the gun, Halls would have seen that at least one lacked the small hole or indent that visually differentiates dummies from bullets. He would have also noticed that it didn’t make the signature rattling that proves there’s only a BB — and no gunpowder — in the dummy round.

Shock rippled through the church. Sixteen crew members were stationed among the church pews. No one was wearing any protective gear — the noise-canceling headphones, safety goggles or furniture moving blankets often offered for scenes involving guns.

It was just supposed to be a dummy round.

Someone screamed and Hutchins fell to the ground instantly, as did Souza, though it was not immediately obvious that he had been hit.

“I was looking right at her, I could see an exit wound that immediately started pouring blood and that’s when [people screamed] ‘She’s shot!’ and everything went crazy,” a crew member said.

“Let’s clear everyone who doesn’t need to be here out of here,” Halls urged the crew.

Mamie Mitchell, the film’s script supervisor, ran outside and called 911 from her cellphone. It was 1:46.

“Bonanza Creek Ranch. Two people accidentally shot on a movie set by a prop gun. We need help immediately,” Mitchell said.

Less than 13 minutes after she hung up, the first Santa Fe County Fire Department emergency responders arrived on scene.

Crew members were shrieking. Sobbing. Shell-shocked. Production assistants, some in their early twenties, were busy guarding the church in an attempt to keep unnecessary parties out. Other young staffers were told to clear the road of crew vehicles, electrical wires and errant church pews so that the ambulances could drive directly up to the church when they arrived.

Down at base camp, a handful of actors were preparing for their scenes that afternoon. Through the window of his trailer, one performer heard a crew member receive an urgent-sounding message over the walkie-talkie: “There’s been an incident. We called 911.”

Still, the actor wasn’t especially concerned. There was typically an overabundance of caution on movie sets. A production assistant asked the talent to remain in their trailers. “Don’t take any photos. Don’t text your friends. Let’s keep this contained,” the staffer advised.

But after about 10 minutes, the actors started getting restless. Some walked to the doors of their trailers to confer with one another. “Two people got shot? How? What the f— ?”

Back in Santa Fe, “Rust” production staff working out of a peach-colored office park plodded forward with payroll and travel logistics, not yet aware that anything was wrong.

On Slack, an internal messaging system used in the office, a production secretary pinged her bosses at 2:03 to say she had a quote ready from a vendor, but still needed to know about sending a truck to get the equipment. That same minute, the fire battalion chief radioed dispatchers to request a medical transport helicopter.

Two ambulances arrived around 2:08 p.m. After passing through the rusting white ranch gates onto unpaved dirt and gravel roads, the emergency vehicles all slowed to about 20 miles per hour.

Even when the helicopter began hovering over the ranch at 2:15. p.m. — just as Souza’s ambulance prepared to depart for St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe — the gravity of the situation was difficult to absorb.

A crew member who’d left to run an errand was stopped at the front gate as she tried to drive back onto the ranch.

“Nobody’s allowed to go up there except the police officers and ambulances,” someone from the transportation department told her. They had to be joking, she thought.

“No,” they said. “Someone has been shot.”

As the first responders worked, police officers requested that all of the crew members who had witnessed the shooting sit for an interview.

“Starting crime scene logs,” was noted in the dispatch record at 2:35 p.m. Everyone else was sent home, and detectives tied off the church area with yellow caution tape.

The aircraft remained on the ground until 2:50 p.m. It seemed like a long time to the actor. How bad could the injury really be if the helicopter stayed on the ground for over half an hour?

Hutchins would ultimately be pronounced dead at the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, to which she had been airlifted.

Back at Bonanza Creek Ranch, Baldwin and about a dozen others sat on the back of a 5-ton truck, awaiting their interviews with police who were inside a faux saloon.

Down at base camp, people were spooked but attempting to remain calm. Trained to comfort with food, a craft services assistant began to pass out homemade trail mix.

Around 3:30, Baldwin returned to base camp. He had changed out of his costume and was wearing his street clothes. “I’ve never been handed a live weapon — ever,” he told his peers, who circled around him. No one there tried to console him because no one there knew just how bad the accident had been.

By late afternoon, news that someone had been shot on a Santa Fe film set was ricocheting through New Mexico’s tight-knit film community. People scrambled to text family and friends on other nearby sets, trying to confirm that they were safe.

Russell, the B-Cam operator who’d nearly been hit by the bullet, drove down to UNM Hospital to try to check on Hutchins.

Luper, the A-camera first assistant who’d quit that morning, picked him up. They were together at Luper’s house when they learned of Hutchins’ death from the news.

At roughly 5:30 p.m., production asked the remaining crew members who had driven themselves to set to form a long line with their cars and exit the ranch en masse.

A few local newspaper reporters had gathered on the street, and driving out altogether would make it more difficult for the media to reach anyone.

International media would descend on Santa Fe in the days that followed, with television crews perpetually stationed outside the sheriff’s office and the entrance to the ranch.

Production crew gathered for a private memorial for Hutchins on Friday night in Santa Fe. At much larger vigils in Albuquerque on Saturday and Los Angeles on Sunday, remembrances conjoined with a broader reckoning around safety on sets.

Producers officially announced their decision “to wrap the set at least until the investigations are complete” in an email to crew members on Sunday night.

They were quietly trying to wrap production as the investigation unfolded. There was travel to book, rental equipment to return and a seemingly endless tally of things to be scanned, shipped or donated.

To-do lists were written and shared in Slack, where Pickle, the line producer, chimed in: “Any remaining alcohol donated to row and gabby!” Someone responded with a thumbs up emoji.

In another message, the line producer’s assistant tasked a PA with donating the office lamps to Goodwill.

“No name or production,” she wrote, “just [d]rop it and run.”

By Matt Stiles, Anousha Sakoui

The accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins by actor Alec Baldwin during filming of the western “Rust” was the latest among a series of fatal injuries that have dogged the industry for years.

A Los Angeles Times review of U.S. government data and published reports shows that at least 19 fatal injuries took place on film sets nationwide from 2010 to 2019, the last year for which data were available.

Overall, at least 47 fatalities have occurred among 250 film production accidents since 1990, according to data reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which tracks serious workplace accidents in the United States that have been reported to the agency.

Fatalities and serious accidents are generally rare in the film and TV industry, thanks to the use of digital effects and improved safety protocols.

Nonetheless, the industry has struggled to improve its safety record and is facing renewed scrutiny from crew members over its practices after the deadly incident on the set of “Rust” in New Mexico.

The accident has become another rallying cry for the industry to address long-standing complaints about unsafe conditions on sets, including long hours. Crew members on the set of “Rust” complained of lax safety standards and tensions with producers before the shooting, The Times reported.

Film- and TV-related fatalities steadily declined in the 1990s and dropped to zero by 2003 as studios and producers stepped up their safety efforts and as some risky stunts were replaced with digital effects.

The industry also remains relatively safe compared with other professions.

For example, the fatal work injury rate for all industries nationwide in 2019 was 3.5 fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The film production industry has a rate of roughly 0.9 fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers during the last decade, The Times’ analysis found.

And its rate of injury and illness was also lower than the average across all industries in the country, the bureau’s data show.

Still, the film and TV industry continues to grapple with high-profile incidents and has seen the number of fatalities increase over the last decade, federal records show.

Some workers died in helicopter crashes; others fell off scaffolding or were fatally injured in car accidents or by heavy equipment — even a freight train and a military-style tank. Some incidents occurred on big-budget features, others on low-budget features and low-cost reality TV programs.

Deaths from prop guns are rare. The previous high-profile gun-related fatality occurred in 1993, when Brandon Lee, the son of the late kung fu star Bruce Lee, died after being shot by a prop gun on the set of the movie “The Crow.”

Several explanations account for the increase in deaths, including overall growth in the workforce and an increase in production to feed an expanding pipeline of content for streaming services.

But authorities and safety experts also say shortcuts taken by producers to save time and money have contributed to the increase in accidents on sets.

“It does not surprise me if you have reduced budgets, a more stressed crew, more expectation on the bottom line, that you are going to have increases in both injuries on set and fatalities,” said attorney Jeff Harris, who represented the families of Jones and of stuntman John Bernecker in wrongful-death lawsuits. Bernecker was killed in a fall on the set of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” in 2017.

The review of federal workplace safety data builds on an investigation by The Times in 2015 that underscored the risk-taking involved in the growing reality television genre after a helicopter crash killed 10 television workers in Argentina. Those fatalities, during a French production, weren’t included in the latest analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration data because they occurred overseas. The Associated Press published similar findings on film set accidents in a 2016 report.

Overall, the federal data show that the film production industry has recorded 47 fatalities and at least 180 injuries that resulted in worker hospitalization, according to The Times’ review. Although the number of fatalities increased in the last decade, the number of accidents overall decreased, the data show.

The vast majority of the accidents occurred in California, often in the Los Angeles area, including the high-profile 2013 helicopter crash in Acton during the filming of a Discovery Channel reality television show. Three people, including the pilot and a cast member, were killed in the crash at Polsa Rosa Ranch. The case wasn’t included in OSHA’s database because it involved flight operations and was investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board.

The use of aircraft and vehicles has been a common source of injury on film production sets over the years, according to OSHA, and misjudgment or the removal of safety devices were among the leading “human” factors contributing to serious accidents.

The causes of the deaths and accidents aren’t always clear in OSHA’s categorization of its inspections, with many documented as “other.”

The most common cause of accidents involved workers falling from elevated spaces, the records show.

That’s what happened in the 2010 case involving the death of photographer Stuart Keene, who was killed in a fall while shooting a motocross race. Some safety railings were removed to provide a better camera angle from the lift, which hadn’t been erected on level ground. The lift swayed and pitched, and Keene fell to the ground, the camera landing on his chest. He died at a hospital, according to an account in federal inspection records.

The Keene case resulted in a $60,000 penalty against the company, Lucas Oil Production Studios, which was reduced from an initial penalty of $90,000 — among the largest ever levied by OSHA against the film production industry. The Times’ review found nearly $1 million in penalties for violations related to film production incidents since 1990.

More recently, in September, a 38-year-old crew member sustained critical injuries and was left fighting for his life after a major fall during construction for the Netflix film “Me Time,” which stars Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. The accident happened at a soundstage at Netflix’s Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood.

Penalties such as those in the Keene case, which are capped for specific workplace violations, are set by Congress and are intended as an “incentive for preventing or correcting violations voluntarily,” according to OSHA’s field operations manual.

“While penalties are not intended as punishment for violations, Congress has made clear that penalty amounts should be sufficient to serve as a deterrent to violations,” the manual reads.

Those penalties have been relatively small compared with settlements and jury verdicts stemming from film production accidents and fatalities.

In the “Walking Dead” case, an Atlanta jury awarded $8.6 million to members of the Bernecker family after their wrongful-death lawsuit.

A jury awarded $11.2 million in 2017 to the family of Jones. The director of “Midnight Rider,” Randall Miller, pleaded guilty in 2015 to involuntary manslaughter in her death.

“Any death in what should be a safe working environment with platinum-rated safety standards is a death too many,” said attorney Chris Deacon. His law firm, Stewarts, represented stuntwoman Olivia Jackson, who lost her arm in a stunt she was performing for the 2016 film “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.”

“If those engaged to work on set in whatever capacity are dying at the hands of the creative process, then something is fundamentally wrong in the production processes,” he said.

By Wendy Lee, Ryan Faughnder, Jenny Jarvie

DECATUR, Ga. — 

When makeup and hair assistant Katelyn Bushong arrived on the Smyrna, Ga., set of the thriller “By Night’s End” in March 2019, all she was expecting was a $125 paycheck for 12 hours of work.

Bushong applied fake blood to actors to make them appear beat up and was reassured by a producer with 3rd Shift Media, a local production services company, that she would get paid after the shoot wrapped.

But Bushong and two other crew members who worked on the low-budget film told The Times they weren’t paid for their services.

“I don’t think you’d want to go to your job and not get paid two years later,” said Bushong, 25, who lives in the Atlanta area.

Though “By Night’s End” was a tiny project by Hollywood standards, it was a big deal for 3rd Shift Media, a company launched in 2016 by Decatur, Ga.-based producer Ryan Dennett-Smith, according to Georgia business records.

The film was prominently featured on a local news broadcast about how filmmakers wanted to create a more sustainable entertainment industry in Georgia by making homegrown productions.

But recently, Dennett-Smith’s company has faced scrutiny for its role in the production of the movie “Rust” in New Mexico, after cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot by a weapon held by actor and producer Alec Baldwin while rehearsing a scene.

Dennett-Smith, chief executive of 3rd Shift Media, was the supervising unit production manager on “Rust.” The film’s line producer, Gabrielle Pickle, and unit production manager, Katherine “Row” Walters, also work for 3rd Shift Media, according to the company’s website.

While producers on independent films can have a wide range of responsibilities, including financing, line producers and unit production managers oversee the day-to-day aspects of filmmaking. Producers hire production services companies to ensure that projects come in on time and on budget.

Interviews with crew members from “Rust” and documents reviewed by the Times paint a picture of a troubled set plagued by labor tensions before the shooting. Crew members said they raised concerns over issues such as gun safety, payment and lodging.

“In my 10 years as a camera assistant, I’ve never worked on a show that cares so little for the safety of its crew,” A-camera first assistant Lane Luper wrote in an Oct. 20 email to Walters the night before the shooting.

The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office is conducting an investigation into how Hutchins died. Prior to the fatal shooting, Assistant Director David Halls yelled “cold gun” and told a sheriff’s detective that he was not aware that the gun had live rounds in it, according to affidavits filed by the sheriff’s office. One of the affidavits said Halls took a prop gun set up by the armorer on a cart and handed the gun to Baldwin, a claim Halls’ attorney has denied.

“Rust,” a western involving period sets and firearms, was supposed to cost about $7 million to make and was to shoot over 21 days, an ambitious time frame for a period piece, film experts have said.

A representative for 3rd Shift Media, Alex Dudley, declined to comment. Pickle, Dennett-Smith and Walters did not respond to requests for comment.

No one answered the door last week at 3rd Shift Media’s office — a tiny, brick ranch-style home in a rundown neighborhood of Decatur. Posted in the windows next to the front door were several yellow movie-shoot location signs — “ACTD2,” “SUMMER 03” and HECK YEAH” — plus a promotional poster for a local brewery: “Weekends are overrated!”

“The safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions and everyone associated with the company,“ Rust Movie Productions said in a statement the day after Hutchins’ death. “Though we were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set, we will be conducting an internal review of our procedures while production is shut down.”

Dennett-Smith had spent years working in Georgia’s scrappy independent filmmaker community. As Hollywood was bringing more large-scale productions into the state to tap lucrative film tax credits, Dennett-Smith wanted to build a film company that was native to Georgia.

Both he and Pickle were involved with the local filmmaker community through nonprofit groups such as the Atlanta Film Society and Georgia Production Partnership. In 2018, they helped lead a push to get local film workers and transplants registered to vote, in part to preserve the state’s production incentive program, according to interviews they did with Atlanta CBS station WGCL-TV.

“They came up within that community before productions were bringing everybody in,” said a producer who worked with Dennett-Smith who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “When I met them, they were very big about wanting to produce quality content and were always very vocal about being safe and working hand in hand with the unions.”

Dennett-Smith started off working in music after high school but transitioned to the film industry after several years. He worked jobs in unscripted and reality TV shows, including Animal Planet’s “Lone Star Law” and “North Woods Law.” Last year, he served as one of the production managers on the Netflix reality dating show “Love Is Blind.”

After he launched 3rd Shift Media, Dennett-Smith described it in a local press interview as a “turnkey” production company for commercials and independent films that would manage 20 to 40 projects a year.

“Our company is set up to have a project brought to us and open up the doors to successfully turn out the project,” he told Voyage ATL in December 2019.

3rd Shift has worked on commercials, trailers and short films and had begun to move more into feature films.

Dennett-Smith, Pickle and Walters worked on the action film “Supercell,” another project starring Alec Baldwin that was produced by Thomasville Pictures and filmed in Montana and Georgia. The owners of Thomasville Pictures, Ryan Donnell Smith and Allen Cheney, are credited as producer and executive producer, respectively, on “Rust.”

According to IMDb, “By Night’s End” is the first feature-length film that credits 3rd Shift Media as the production company.

In an online panel discussion on indie filmmaking posted on YouTube, Dennett-Smith talked about the challenges of making movies with scant resources, recalling how he cooked breakfast for the crew every morning on “By Night’s End.”

“Indie film’s a hustle,” he said in the video. “It’s all about figuring out how scrappy you can get ... what you can borrow from your friends, family. How much money can you pull together to do stuff.”

Bushong, who had previously worked on various film shorts, expected to be paid after the 12-day shoot was completed.

A crew member agreement viewed by The Times said compensation would be deferred until the film was sold, an arrangement that is common for microbudget independent movies like “By Night’s End.”

In November 2020, Dennett-Smith sent an email to some crew members who were awaiting paychecks, informing them that the film had been sold — it’s available through services including Amazon, YouTube and Tubi — but that payments would be deferred at least until the middle or fourth quarter of this year.

However, Bushong and two other crew members who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals said they still had not been paid.

“I had no idea who to reach out to because I was nonunion, and they said we would be paid after production,” Bushong said.

The economics of indie filmmaking have become increasingly challenging for producers. The theatrical market for indies has largely disappeared. The insatiable demand for content from streaming services has led to a surge in production. Producers are responding by trying to make movies faster and cheaper.

“The model is broken,” said Alex Ferrari, an Austin-based director who hosts the podcast Indie Film Hustle and is not connected to “Rust.” “There is stronger and stronger pressure on these film productions to cut corners, make it for lower costs.”

On “Rust,” many crew members described a rushed mentality on the set.

Jonas Huerta, a digital utility technician, said he raised concerns about production issues, including safety. He sent a email detailing his concerns to Walters the night before Hutchins’ death.

“I also feel anxious on set, I’ve seen firsthand our [assistant director] rush to get shots and he skips over important protocols,” Huerta wrote in his email, The Times reported Oct. 31.

The next morning, when the camera crew was packing up to leave the set, Pickle ordered them “to work faster,” Huerta said. She pointed at Luper, the A-camera first assistant, and said: “You need to get off the property immediately, or I will call security,” Luper recalled in an interview.

Pickle had faced a labor dispute on another production. In October 2018, while serving as a line producer on “Keys to the City,” Pickle “interrogated employees about signing union authorization cards,” according to a settlement agreement between IATSE and the Georgia-based production company, Tier 2 Films.

According to the document, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter, the production company fired several employees, including camera crew, because of union activities. IATSE, which brought the complaint to the National Labor Relations Board, accused Pickle of calling and texting employees about their unionization activities. The production company also called police to remove union representatives, the union said. Tier 2 Films settled in 2019 and agreed to pay back wages to seven workers.

Times staff writers Meg James, Amy Kaufman and Julia Wick contributed to this report.