WASHINGTON — Sheriff Parnell Jeannine Post of Santa Fe County, New Mexico, said Monday that a suspected live round fired from screenwriter and director Bryan Singer’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” set last week is not what sparked a firearm fire inside the UCLA Medical Center emergency room.
Post, who initially believed the bullet lodged in the ceiling of the hospital emergency room had sparked a small explosion, said it was “an old gun discharged … inside of a plastic barrel.” That charge, she said, was confirmed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
More than 30 people, including dozens of emergency-room patients, were evacuated from the hospital on Thursday night following the mass evacuation of patients when the gun was discharged, a news release from Santa Fe County said.
No one was injured in the fire and the hospital was deemed safe to open the next day.
Singer, in a statement on his Facebook page, had said on Wednesday that a squad car belonging to Deputy Mike Baldwin “came in contact with what appeared to be a live round” while he was on the “Iron Man 3” set. Baldwin, a former sheriff’s deputy in Santa Fe County, had been acting as a stand-in for actor Robert Downey Jr. when the round was fired.
“During the skirmish,” Singer had said, Baldwin fired a gun toward the setting “nearing enough to crash a parked squad car into the base of the main console, which is where it came in contact with the filming prop and then went off. It caused the one prop, which appeared to be a live round, to shoot out into the air.”
