A British woman visiting her father in Texas was shot in the chest and killed after a tense dispute about President Trump, an inquest was told on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026, at Cheshire Coroner’s Court.
Lucy Harrison, 23, from Great Sankey in Warrington, died on Jan. 10, 2025, at the Prosper, Texas, home of her father, Kris Harrison. She was fatally wounded by a Glock 9 mm semi-automatic pistol just minutes before she and her boyfriend, Samuel Littler, were scheduled to leave for the airport.
According to the inquest, Lucy and her father had a “big argument” about President Trump earlier that morning. Trump’s second-term inauguration was ten days away. The disagreement intensified when Lucy, strongly opposed to firearms, asked her father: “How would you feel if I was the girl in that situation and I’d been sexually assaulted?”
Littler testified that Kris Harrison responded by saying he had two other daughters living with him, so it would not bother him too much, according to his account.
The remark left Lucy “quite upset,” and she ran upstairs. Tensions seemed to ease afterward, and the family ate lunch together before her planned departure.
Roughly half an hour before they were due to leave for the airport, Kris Harrison took Lucy by the hand and brought her into his ground-floor bedroom. Littler testified that about 15 seconds later he heard a loud gunshot, followed by Harrison shouting for his wife, Heather.
“I remember running into the room and Lucy was lying on the floor near the bathroom entrance and Kris was just screaming, just sort of nonsense,” Littler told the court.
In a statement read at the hearing, Kris Harrison said he and Lucy had been watching a news segment about gun violence. He said he mentioned owning a gun and asked if she wanted to see it, and that she agreed. They then went to his bedroom, where he kept the firearm in a lockbox in his bedside drawer.
Harrison had bought the gun two years earlier for what he described as a “sense of security” for his family. Texas law does not require a license to possess firearms for home protection.
“As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang,” Harrison said. “I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell.”
He told investigators he could not remember whether his finger was on the trigger while taking the gun out of its case.
The inquest heard that Harrison had previously undergone treatment for alcohol addiction and admitted he had “briefly lapsed” on the day of Lucy’s death because he was emotional about her leaving.
CCTV footage showed Harrison buying two 500 ml cartons of Chardonnay from a 7-Eleven shortly before 1 p.m. that day. He drank about 500 ml of the wine over two to three hours. Police officer Luciana Escalera, whose statement was read in court, reported smelling alcohol on Harrison’s breath when she responded to the scene.
Tests showed Lucy Harrison had no alcohol or drugs in her system when she died. Five people were in the house when police arrived.
The Prosper Police Department initially handled the case as a potential criminally negligent homicide. But on June 10, 2025—exactly five months after the shooting—a grand jury in Collin County chose not to indict Kris Harrison, returning a “no-bill” decision.
Lucy’s mother, Jane Coates, said the grand jury’s decision made no sense to her and left her feeling that no one would be held accountable for her daughter’s death.
In a statement issued by his lawyers, Kris Harrison expressed regret for what had occurred.
Harrison did not appear at the inquest. His legal representatives sought unsuccessfully to have senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish step aside, arguing the process had been handled “in a manner more akin to a criminal investigation than a fact-finding inquiry.”
Coates described her daughter — a buyer for the fashion brand Boohoo and a graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University — as “a real force of life.”
Littler, who had known Lucy since their time at Great Sankey High School, said he was “one of the very fortunate ones who met ‘their person’ at a very young age, and I will be forever grateful to experience that, even for just one minute.”
The couple had bought their first home together nine months earlier and had hosted their first Christmas just days before flying to Texas from Heathrow. Lucy had texted her mother that she was “packed up” and ready to leave for the airport just 15 minutes before the shooting.
Lucy’s funeral took place at St Elphin’s Parish Church in Warrington, England, on Feb. 24, 2025.
On February 11, 2026, the British coroner’s inquest delivered a significant ruling on the case, determining that Lucy Harrison died due to unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter.
Cheshire Senior Coroner Jacqueline Devonish concluded that the fatal wound could only have occurred with the gun pointed directly at Harrison across the room, describing Kris Harrison’s behavior as “gross” due to the obvious and foreseeable risk of death.
The coroner’s ruling painted a starkly different picture than Kris Harrison’s account, stating he was a “secret drinker” who was teasing his daughter with a loaded gun despite having no firearms training and never having fired the weapon. The inquest noted that his actions killed his own daughter in circumstances where he posed a clear risk to her life.
While this British ruling carries legal weight in the UK, it does not override the Texas grand jury’s 2025 decision declining to indict Harrison on criminal charges in the United States.