Lucy Harrison, a 23-year-old woman from Cheshire, was unlawfully killed when her father shot her in the chest at his home in Texas following an argument about Donald Trump, a coroner has ruled.
The fashion buyer for Boohoo, who lived in Warrington, was visiting her father Kris Harrison in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year when he pointed a semi-automatic handgun at her and pulled the trigger. Senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish concluded that Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking, acted with gross negligence and that the killing was unlawful.
Harrison claimed the gun discharged accidentally while he was showing it to his daughter, but the coroner rejected this, finding that he ‘knew full well he had shot his own daughter’. Texas police did not charge him.
Lucy’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, told the inquest that she had been upset by a ‘quite a big argument’ about Trump earlier that day. She had asked her father: ‘How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?’ Littler also said Harrison had previously spoken about carrying the gun ‘like James Bond’.
The coroner described Harrison as a ‘secret drinker’ who had no experience with guns and no training. She noted that he kept the Glock 9mm pistol for ‘home defence’, for which no licence is required in Texas. ‘His actions have killed his own daughter,’ she said.
