On Tuesday, a coroner in the U.K. ruled that 23-year-old Lucy Harrison was “unlawfully” killed by her father last year on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter, per The Guardian. The ruling comes over a year after Lucy, who worked in the U.K. as a fashion buyer for Boohoo, was found dead with a single gunshot to the chest following an argument with her father, Kris Harrison, while visiting him in January 2025.
Lucy’s death has been under investigation in the U.K. since February 2025 but was never prosecuted in the U.S. In June, a Texas grand jury declined to indict Kris, but his daughter’s case remained open in the U.K., where sudden deaths — including ones that happen abroad — are investigated by special courts.
During a two-day hearing at Cheshire Coroner’s Court this month, Lucy’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, testified that she and her father had a strained relationship and argued about Donald Trump the day he shot her. According to court documents reported by the New York Times, Littler, who had accompanied Lucy on the trip to the Dallas suburb of Prosper, testified that she disliked that her father kept a gun in his home, where Lucy’s two younger half-sisters lived. Kris reportedly maintained that he kept the weapon in the house for “home defense,” and was not required to have a license to own or carry the gun, per Texas law.
Littler also said that Kris had a habit of taking his gun out of its box and walking around with it “like James Bond.” According to The Guardian, one of Lucy’s friends also testified that Lucy was “categorically anti-gun” and was worried about her father’s “volatility.”
According to Littler’s account of the day she died, Lucy was upset because she and her father had gotten into “quite a big argument” about Trump, who was set to be inaugurated as president later that month. Lucy apparently asked her father how he’d feel if she were one of the girls that Trump had allegedly sexually assaulted. Per Littler, Kris responded that he had two other daughters, so it wouldn’t upset him that much.
Thirty minutes before they were set to go to the airport, Littler said he saw Kris grab Lucy by the hand in a “mysterious” manner and lead her to his bedroom, where he stored his Glock 9-mm. pistol. Littler recalled hearing a loud bang and “running into the room,” where he saw Lucy “lying on the floor” with Kris standing above her screaming “nonsense” and calling out for his wife, Heather. Per The Guardian, when Texas police came to investigate, Kris claimed the gun went off accidentally when he “lifted it to show her.” A summary of the inquest referenced by the Times said that an officer from the Prosper Police Department “could smell alcohol” while questioning Kris, though he denied being under the influence at the time of the shooting.
While Kris Harrison did not appear in court Tuesday, his attorney presented a statement on his behalf, where he claimed that Lucy had asked to see his gun. “As I lifted the gun to show her, I suddenly heard a loud bang,” the statement read, according to the BBC. “I did not understand what had happened. Lucy immediately fell.”
After the two-day U.K. trial, senior coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled that Kris, who had been drinking, “knew full well he had shot his own daughter, pointing a gun at chest height and pulling the trigger.” She maintained that because Kris was a “secret drinker,” she believed that he didn’t know the gun was loaded and suspected he’d been taunting Lucy with it when he shot her. She told the court, “His actions have killed his own daughter, and in the cold light of day it is hoped that he now recognizes 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.”
In a second statement, sent to the Liverpool Echo, Kris maintained that he “fully accepts the consequences” of his actions. “There isn’t a day I don’t feel the weight of that loss — a weight I will carry for the rest of my life, and I know that nothing I say can ease the heartbreak this tragedy has caused,” he said.
Per the Times, because the ruling came from a coroner’s court and not a criminal court, it has no legal consequence in the United States. Still, Lucy’s mother, Jane Coates, said that she welcomed the outcome after “an unrelenting year of deep shock, grief, and fight.” She also believed that the grand-jury hearing in Texas lacked the “rigor and scrutiny” that is expected of British courts. “We respectfully accept that our two cultures are different in regards to firearms,” she added, “yet we feel Texas gun laws did not keep Lucy safe from harm.”
This post has been updated.