A Cheshire woman who was shot dead by her “reckless” father while visiting him in the US after a row about Donald Trump was unlawfully killed, a coroner has ruled.
Lucy Harrison, 23, who lived in Warrington and worked as a fashion buyer for Boohoo, was shot in the chest with a semi-automatic handgun by Kris Harrison while staying at his home in Prosper, Texas, on 10 January last year.
Kris Harrison, an alcoholic who had been drinking earlier in the day, pointed the gun at his daughter and pulled the trigger, senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled.
He was never charged by Texas police in relation to her death, after claiming the gun went off accidentally while he “lifted it to show her”.
At the conclusion of the two-day hearing at Cheshire coroner’s court, Devonish found Harrison “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.
Sam Littler, Lucy’s boyfriend, who was with her on the trip, told the inquest she had become upset earlier that day after having “quite a big argument” with her father about Trump, who was due to be inaugurated as president 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?”
He responded that it would not upset him that much.
Littler said he always “felt on edge” while visiting, adding: “There was a lot of very opinionated people in the house.”
He said his girlfriend’s father had spoken in the past about taking the gun out of the box and walking around with it “like James Bond”.
A friend of Lucy’s also gave evidence saying she had confessed she felt “extremely anxious” in her father’s home due to “volatility”. She said Lucy was “categorically anti-gun” and was worried about there being a firearm in the house with her two younger half-sisters.
On the day Lucy was shot, Littler said he witnessed Harrison taking his daughter by the hand in a “mysterious” manner about 30 minutes before they were due to leave and led her to his bedroom, where he kept a Glock 9mm pistol.
Within about 15 seconds he heard a “loud bang”, which he had initially thought was a prank by Harrison.
Harrison, who works as an executive at a fibre optics company and moved to the US when Lucy was a child, said he kept the lethal weapon for “home defence”, for which he did not need a licence in the state of Texas.
He did not attend the hearing but produced a statement claiming Lucy had asked him to see the gun. “As I lifted the gun to show her I suddenly heard a loud bang. I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell.”
He told police who attended the scene: “We got it out to have a look and just as I picked it up it just went off.”
However, the coroner ruled that Harrison was a “secret drinker” who had, on the balance of probabilities, been teasing his daughter with the gun when he shot her dead. She said she accepted that he did not know the gun was loaded when he pointed it at her and pulled the trigger.
She added: “His actions have killed his own daughter and in the cold light of day it is hoped that he now recognises the risk he posed to her life in circumstances in which he had no experience of guns, had undertaken no training and had never fired a gun.”
