A Cheshire woman who was shot dead by her father during a visit to the US following an argument about Donald Trump has been ruled unlawfully killed. Lucy Harrison, 23, from Warrington, was shot in the chest with a semi-automatic handgun by Kris Harrison at his home in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year.
Senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish, sitting at Cheshire coroner’s court, ruled that Kris Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking earlier that day, pointed the gun at his daughter and pulled the trigger. Despite claiming the gun went off accidentally, the coroner found that he “knew full well he had shot his own daughter, pointing a gun at chest height and pulling the trigger”. She ruled Lucy died due to unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter.
Lucy’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, who was with her on the trip, told the inquest she had become upset after a “quite a big argument” with her father about Trump, who was due to be inaugurated later that month. Lucy had asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?” Littler said he always felt “on edge” while visiting, noting “a lot of very opinionated people in the house”.
A friend of Lucy’s gave evidence that she felt “extremely anxious” in her father’s home due to “volatility” and was “categorically anti-gun”. On the day of the shooting, Littler witnessed Harrison leading his daughter to his bedroom, where he kept a Glock 9mm pistol. Within 15 seconds, a loud bang was heard. Harrison, who works at a fibre optics company and moved to the US when Lucy was a child, said he kept the weapon for “home defence”, for which no licence was needed in Texas.
Harrison did not attend the hearing but provided a statement claiming Lucy had asked to see the gun and that it discharged accidentally as he lifted it. However, the coroner ruled that he was a “secret drinker” who had, on the balance of probabilities, been teasing his daughter with the gun. She accepted he did not know it was loaded but said his actions showed he “had no experience of guns, had undertaken no training and had never fired a gun”. Texas police did not charge him in relation to Lucy’s death.
