¶ Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum
Y'all. Of course we're going to talk about Alec Baldwin and some other folks as somebody in law enforcement. This investigation went on for a year, and here we are with twists and turns and things just blowing up there at the last minute. So let's talk about miss Reid again. You already said that it kind of came out in trial that she had no care of concern for Miss
Hutchins who was killed. Well, I will tell you right now she also didn't have any care of concern for Miss Smith because Miss Smith could have been arrested, Miss Smith could have relapsed, and Miss Smith could have gotten on a relapsed train that took her life. So again she is displaying I have no care about anybody but me exactly.
¶ Roles and responsibilities on set
And you know this also goes to so Alec Baldwin as an actor, which is what he was being tried as, has no obligation or or not even obligation.
It is not his role too. Once he's been told this is a cold gun, it is not his role to check it. If the assistant director, who is the supervisor technically to the propmaster and the armorer hands him a gun and says cold gun what that means is that the armorer has cleared it for the assistant da a director rather, and then it's clear the actor would not have to test it. It's not now. Baldwin worked
with guns for forty years. He's a veteran actor. And even so, there is no rule in the SAG laws, you know, to say an actor has to retest or re you know, double check what's already been double check. That's not their job. Their job is to act with the prop. So number one, he would not have been
found guilty by a jury. And this as I watched the trial before this whole thing about the hiding of the evidence came to bear, I'm realizing an opening statements, there's no case here, not against him as an actor. Had the judge ruled he tried as both a producer and actor, then yes there's a case. Absolutely there's a case because he scrimped on everything. And he knew because he did an interview with George Stephanopolis after the whole
¶ Unsafe set conditions
incident in which he said, I didn't know that my crew weren't being housed overnight. I didn't know that they were complaining about unsafe conditions. Had I known that that somebody slept in their car. I could have taken money out from my salary to make sure things were right.
And that the same interview where he said I didn't pull the.
Trigger, yep, And so you know, but there you have see if I'm prosecutor, I'm pulling that out. And I'm saying, look, he knows what his responsibility should be as producer. He's putting lives in Jeffary. If you have people work for thirteen hours straight and then drive for fifty miles and turn around after they sleep a couple hours, and drive back and work for another thirteen hours, that's fair, that's safe, it's not sick. And then whatever nonsense is going on
around that set plinking with blanks. I don't think it was real, Ammo. I think it was blanks. But blanks still are violence.
And you know, I'm going to say this, and it may not be popular, but if you take your child to a public swimming pool and you say, well, there's a lifeguard there, so I don't have to watch them, to me, Alec Baldwin should have at least double checked. I mean, it's a revolver, you know it would take a second.
So here's two things. One thing I had said was what I had thinking about this is if he were doing a scene that involved a Russian Roulette where you had to put that gun to his head, do you think he would have just double triple checked it before he pulled the trigger? Say that again, you know, let's say, Okay, the scene is, I'm gonna put the gun to my head and play Russian Roulette and it's cold. Good, let me just check.
Uh huh. Well, let's just get really real. If somebody told me you're gonna do a love scene with Matthew McConaughey, I'm gonna shave my legs fourteen times.
I'm gonna.
I'm gonna come over and borrow some of your fancy perfume. Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna get ready. I'm on check, double check, triple check. I'm gonna be so ready to get naked with him. Do you understand the So you're not gonna take four days to get your hair done, get your makeup done, brush your teeth, shave your legs, etcetera. And you can't double check a gun that you're about to point in another person.
One hundred percent, I hear you, and you know That's what I thought and what I still think in terms of that, but legally according to SAG rules, and so people I've argued with people about this and they give me their scenario, and so what you can give you an alternative scenario that people have brought up, which is if you're a surgeon and for forming a procedure, and you ask for a scalpel, and you're being handed that by nurses and technicians who are professionals and whose job
it is to make sure everything is sterilized, et cetera. And you use that scalpel and it turns out the scalpel had some kind of you know, infectious disease on, it wasn't cleaned right, and you wind up killing your patient because of it. Are you guilty of murder? You know? Or of chilling someone? I should say, rather, are you guilty? Are you at fault for killing that person if in fact that happened. So in that scenario, think about that for a minute.
Cheryl, you're right, But I'm just gonna again come to the bottom line of it. Where does the buck stop if your action intended or otherwise CAUs to death.
It starts with you.
So this absolutely at least starts with Alec Baldwin and then you work backwards. But I'm saying you picked a pistol up no matter what you were told, pointed at another person, pulled that trigger, and then lied about that part.
Well, yeah, because he doesn't want to be responsible for that death.
You're right, he lied exactly because he knows his action at least caused it. And I'll be honest with you. I've said this before on other cases. I have a problem with involuntary manslaughter. I think it is horrible that you're driving down the road and a tire comes off of your car and kills somebody. You didn't intend for that to happen. You had no malice, the forethought to harm anybody. You didn't set out to kill another person, and it's going to negatively affect the rest of your life.
I don't think that person needs to go to prison. But the bottom line is who's responsible for that vehicle? They are, and their mechanic and the tire company and whoever put the axles together. All I'm saying is it goes backwards, but you absolutely start with the person with the action.
I hear you, and it's interesting to me too. While I have Hollywood friends, I have to say I live on the East Coast, and you know I lived in Hollywood for many years. It's changed quite a bit over the years. As we all know, California has gotten, in my mind, kind of kooky, very kooky and unsafe in many cities. But I do know that my people out in California are convinced that he had no absolutely no responsibility.
This wasn't his fault. This is at which one he should never have been tried for this, you know, Whereas when I first heard it, I thought he should be tried for secondarymder because I'm thinking second degree murder. I did this San Francisco dogmall in case. Did they know that those dogs could kill? Well, the jury and the great jury decided to charge them with secondary verb and
they got convicted. The woman Marjorie dellac A convicted of secondary murder because she knew those dogs were lethal weapons.
¶ Tampering with evidence
Now, I want you to hit on one thing before we go any further. Regardless of what somebody thinks about Alec Malwin. And I know he's got some diehard fans, and I know he's got some people that don't care for him at all. But when you've got a prosecutor that hide something, and you've got a judge saying terms like bad faith and highly prejudicial toward the defendant, that's scary because if he in fact had no culpability, if he wasn't guilty, it was not fair that anything was
left out. And I want to address the two case numbers just real quick. If we have a stolen vehicle and that's given a case number, and then we find the vehicle that's a recovered vehicle and could absolutely have another case number and should, but then those case numbers are attached, so anytime you look up one, you're going to see the other. When that was not done here, I didn't have a problem with it being a second case number. I had a problem with that not being attached.
And then them all getting in a room and talking about what they weren't going to tell anybody happened. And then it's on freaking body cam. I watched the body cam.
Unbelievable, Right, sure, it's unbelievable. But now here we have a new thing. As of yesterday, Halngutierras and she are requiring our requesting that not only does her case get an appeal, but that it gets drew dismissed, that it gets overturned, and that she is let out nap like right now. And if they're going to if they're going not to overturn it, which they will not. Can't overturn a jury verdict, that can that's not gonna happened. But
they're asking for it. Then won her out for appeal and out on you know, out on, be free on board.
Bottom line, baby, if you hit evidence in his case, you hid it in mind to.
Right accept While she may get she may she's going to get a new trial, and she may be let out because she's not a acent in society while awaiting the new trial. But here's the big difference, Cheryl. Her job is to make sure that what is the job of an ror it is you make sure that every single piece of ammo, every bullet, every gun, every anything that has to do with ammunition is safe, secured, locked and checked. And she didn't do it.
And here's the deal. Have you ever watched a pilot go through their checklist?
No, what I can imagine.
They do it every single time. They'll walk around that plane. They'll look at the tires, they'll look at the wings, They do this whole big thing before they ever even get in the cockpit. And the deal is, lives are at stake. You want to cut corners and not check the engine. You want to, you know, not check that tire to make sure it ain't going to blow out the minute you hit the runway. You have to do
these things. And you know the folks that take on the firearms instructors or the different trainings with firearms, those people are next level. They do not get in a hurry. They will check and recheck and examine and re examine at nauseum to the point the rest of us may even be making fun of them. But the bottom line is everybody goes home.
Saved, exactly Sheryl. And in this case, this woman who again is drinking, is drugging. We have her on text admitting I'm just going to smoke tonight and she doesn't smoke cigarettes. Right before it happened, they're saying she was
¶ Aphrodite discusses the lack of reporting of evidence
fuzzy headed the next day. I don't know what she did. She went and she locked this stuff up before lunch and came back and didn't It's just crazy. She is liable for the death of this woman. And I think she's criminally liable. I don't think because they hid bullets that it gets her. It gets away with her because
the charger with bringing the bullets on. I said, okay, they're gonna take that charge away, but they still have the fact that it's her responsibility, her job to make sure that everything on that set is safe, and she shirked it. But you know, she's there crying thinking her lawyers were asking for her to have you know, parole and never do a day in jail and let it out. And the judge threw the book at her only could get her eighteen months. I wish you'd gotten more with
that state. That's what they allow. And now I said, you're looking Cheryl at maybe she's going to just get the whole thing thrown out, like it'll get maybe dismissed, or she'll getting the trial. And meantime, who knows, I mean, is that way?
You know what? Ephrodding that whole Karen read thing. It just I don't know. I was so angered by Trooper Proctor that I said early on, he's going to blow this whole thing up. Not only you can take the text messages completely out of it, but you've got a lead detective that never went to the crime scene, only interviewed three people, made his mind up in sixteen hours, never marked where the body was, never measured. It went bad. So again in this case with Prosecutor Morrissey, she hid evidence.
It's been established, as you have already said so eloquently. So she has not only taken justice off the table for the you know, Hutchins family, once she's liable to do it a second time.
Right, Well, and that's it, you know, you poison the well. Now the will is poisoned. As the judge said, there
¶ Comparisons to other cases
is no way to rectify this, There is no way to go back because now you can't test those bullets. You can't determine whether or not those bullets matched the bullet that was on set.
You know.
Hence the argument that handingteers brought bullets on the set goes away. And then even though she's completely at fault, completely at fault, Cheryl for not having protected that set, that crew and all the actors from the weapons, it doesn't matter because this mistake or deliberate attempts to frame her, whatever you want to call it, has now destroyed it. And that's the thing.
When she first got those, and she's looking at that box of ammunition. She didn't examine every single bullet. She herself didn't say, hey, some of these alive, I'm gonna go lock them in the trunk of my car. She just took everything to the said and just hey, ae meenie miney mode, I'm gonna pick these and load this gun.
Well, you know the other thing too, if you noticed that when the trial was on for Baldwin, you saw that this round of bullets that were put together on an evidence slide, and most of them had a brass color to them and two had a silver color to them. Okay, so just think that I'm not an armor, I'm not anybody. But if I'm looking at bullets, I'm gonna load into a gun, right, I'm gonna say, boy, these are different, like like a battery, Like is this the right one?
Like that? Or no, doesn't? How is it? And again it goes back to she's twenty four years old. She's trying to make a name for herself. She thinks she's a big shot because her dad's a big shot, and she's thrown wielded guns around. She walked into a restaurant with a gun the prosecutors after her for all of the above, triter for the cocaine possession. That charge went to the jury of Tambury with evidence that was that was was a charge that went to the jury on
good chairs this case. She was found not guilty, that guilty of, you know, a voluntary manslaughter. But that prosecutor was going after her every which way she could, and I think she should have been going after her every which way she could. But she went overboard, she stepped over the line and thought she was never going to get caught. I mean, it was stunning to me, Cheryl watching the trial. I'm watching this woman testify, right, and I'm thinking to myself, what is she talking about? You
got bullets from a concerned citizen or outside. I was like, who is this? What are you talking about?
What?
You know, It's just it was like it was I felt like I was in slow motion listening to it, Like I couldn't assimilate it, you know, I couldn't consume it, as you know, because sometimes you're in a horrible situation and it's not until afterward that you kind of look back and go, oh my god. You know, I could have been killed back there or whatever it was, you know, sliced away from an accident by a millimeter and you look at it and you say, Holy John, what just happened?
I mean, that's how I felt about the fact that this woman was testifying this CSI saying, you know, I lobbed them in. Yeah, he had me a whole bunch of bullets. I lobbed them in, and uh, you know, what'd you log in the house? I just I documented her? What does that mean? I document? You know, she's trying to walk around it because now she knows she's on
¶ Ethical issues within the case
a hot seat.
And that's the thing.
I mean.
I am a crime scene investigator. I am telling you your report must be so clear, and there is no one I don't care what their rank is. This is going to get me to write something that is not accurate. It's not going to happen.
That's why she started a squirre.
Oh yeah, And that's why she couldn't even articulate about the case number, because I kept waiting for her just to explain it. It's a different case number because this happened a different day. This was somebody that brought evidence. It's a different thing. It's attached to the case but everything that would happen would have a different case number. She never said that, And that's when I started watching the judge and I was like, oh lord, this is
about to go south. And all I could think of was true or Proctor, And I'm like, are you telling me back to back? We're going to have an ethical issue with the side of the commonwealth.
Or the state. For me. The other thing about all this is that we have so many people in this country who want to go after law enforcement and want to go after our judicial system and say that it's no good. I mean, you know the case of Michael Peterson. You know that there are many people that want to say, you know, nobody fell down the stairs, it was an owl. And you know everybody in the crime world we know
about this mystical owl. The thing is, there are defense attorneys and others who go around the country killing off our justice system, talking about it to a point where and the media where we start to think our justice system is no good, that it's corrupt. Now let me wind the clock backs here a minute. What about our justice system in comparison to every other justice system in the.
World, hands down the best ever, not even close.
We're not chopping people's hands off because they touch something, you know, a woman in Arabia or whatever. We're not doing that. You know, we're not in China where people just shot. We're not in Russia. We're not in Italy where they just string someone up without the correct evidence. Amandon Ox, You know, I wish that we could turn the clock back a little bit for us in America and understand that there is no better justice system than
the one we have. Is are there people who are imperfect? Yes? Did Alec Baldwin get away? Yes? He did. Is Hannah Goucierras going to get away? I guess? Did Michael Peterson get away with murder? He sure did because a blood expert testified in a way that wasn't choose for long the stand because he was over zealous. Having said that those are anomalies. You and I know this. I've been in a criminal course for over thirty years of murder trials. Things go by the book, Most law enforcement go by
the book. Has to bring corruption in the past. We know about in Cook County, Chicago, and I've interviewed people who are wrongfully imprisoned. Help one get out pay Tyronhood who didn't do it. But at the end of the day, in our current society, for sure, we don't have people out there to get someone. We have people who are in law enforcement who are trying to keep us safe.
Absolutely, and I can prove it to you because every expert that's own TV is shocked and they wouldn't be if it was normal. If people will flip a coin, maybe they're going to do the right thing, maybe they're not.
They do the right thing, Yes they do, Yes they do. When I hear you talk, you remind me of so many law enforcement people that I've worked with, a dealt with over the years. Who I mean, come on, the people I work with are absolutely impenetrable in terms of their ethics and their way they go about handling a case. This is why most of the cases I've dealt with are you know, people are found guilty of murder. It doesn't get changed, there's no appeal, there's you know, they gets considered.
Girl, you go on and write a book, the book is made into a movie, and still nobody is coming forward saying this is and right, this was wrong?
Right? Yeah, it's it's so cool, you know, And that's just it.
You know.
I mean, we have a justice system in this country and a law enforcement service in this country that's better than any other in the whole world. And yet we want to sit here and general public say they're no good. The justice system is no good. It's a bunch of garbage. Well, look at all those people in Boston or Camden, Massachusetts screaming and yelled about Karen Read and her innocence. Me and friend, well guess what, No, I don't think she was and I don't think she's innocent. That's me.
But again, if somebody had done their job properly, there may be no question about it exactly.
Well, there you have it. That's the problem there. And so that's allow those people to then whip themselves up into a frenzy and start bad melting the law, the justice system. There's bad apples share. My first book is called The FBI Chiller. It was about an FBI agent who killed his informant. He murdered her because she was pregnant and she was threatening to show her her positive pregnancy tests to the wife because she was this mistress and girl.
That's a good book too, honey, thank you.
You know that was needed to a movie with Patricihark kept playing susant Dannis with But the point of it is is that is there a rogue FBI agent is this Yeah, he's the only one before and since that's ever done, anything like that doesn't happen. It happens, but it's not the norm. It's the exception.
Well stated. Now, I'm gonna let you go, but before I do, I want us to talk about something exciting. The week that this airs, the Wednesday that this episode drops, y'all,
¶ WIN Aphrodite's book:
from Wednesday to Friday, We're going to let people enter a contest to win a book from Aphrodite Jones. She mailed them to me herself, Levi's Eyes. So I've got three copies, so there's going to be three winners. And I just want to again tell you thank you so much for being with us tonight. Thank you for being so gracious and generous to get books to people, because Honie, they're going to register to win them things.
I hope so. And Cheryl, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. I must say, every time I talk with you, I learn more and more about the law, about the way you've been raised. And I have to say, I really, really admire your work, ethic, your work, and everything that you do. I think you're just tremendous.
I appreciate that so much, y'all. I'm going to end Zone seven the way that I always do, with a vote.
¶ "You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive. A husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother." -J.M.M.S
You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, miss Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner, and a little boy would have his mother. Judge Mary Marlowe Summer. I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is his own seven