Lucy Harrison felt that 2024 was her best year yet. The 23-year-old had graduated from university with first class honours, landed her dream job and bought her first house with her boyfriend.
She was a “big girl adult” now, Lucy would say. She shed tears of joy seeing her idol, Taylor Swift, at Wembley on the Eras tour that summer. Life could hardly get any better. “All the hard work, all the tears, everything was coming to fruition,” said her mother, Jane Coates, from Warrington in north-west England.
That Christmas, Lucy and her boyfriend, Sam Littler, flew to Texas to spend time with her father, Kris Harrison, who had left the family home when she was two. The pair had a complex relationship – Harrison was a recovering alcoholic – and Littler, 24, did not want them to go. But Lucy enjoyed seeing her two younger half-sisters at their home in Prosper, an affluent suburb 30 miles north of Dallas.
Lucy and Littler were due to fly home to the UK on 10 January 2025 when Coates received a knock on the door. It was Littler’s mother. Lucy had been shot, she said. She was dead.
It was only later she learned that Kris Harrison had been holding the gun. He was never arrested and a grand jury chose not to indict him, based on an investigation by local police.
Eighteen months on, Coates is urging Andy Burnham’s government to encourage US authorities to reopen the case after a Cheshire coroner ruled that Lucy was unlawfully killed.
Coates, a deputy head teacher, raised Lucy as a single parent from the age of two. The pair had an incredibly close bond and would talk about virtually everything. As a child, she was always outside exploring, climbing trees, riding her bike, before becoming engrossed in Harry Potter books – a “comfort blanket” she would turn to time and again into adulthood.
By the age of nine, she was a devout Swiftie, performing a Taylor Swift song at her school leavers’ assembly and later going to three of her concerts. Anyone who knew Lucy knew her contagious laughter. “We call it like the Barbara Windsor belly laugh,” said Coates, 49.
Like many young adults, Lucy went through difficult times. She struggled with the uncertainty of what she wanted to do with her life in her late teens, Coates said. She had counselling to help with the relationship with her father.
But Lucy had never been happier than in 2024. She graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in fashion buying and merchandising, began working at the retailer Boohoo and bought a home with Littler, her “soulmate”, five minutes from both of their mothers.
“That final year of Lucy’s was the best year of her life,” Coates said. “She was such a high achiever and she just really wanted the best for herself.”
She soaked up life, both good and bad. But that meant she would sometimes get upset about events happening thousands of miles away.
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 was one such event, Coates remembers. “She used to worry. She was an overthinker and used to cry a lot at different things. Sometimes it was with frustration because she was very passionate about things.”
She was vehemently opposed to guns, an issue that caused tension with her father. Harrison, a telecoms executive originally from Liverpool, moved to Saudi Arabia for work when she was a child, later settling in Texas where he married Heather Harrison, an education recruiter, and had two daughters.
Harrison had bought a pistol for $500 (£370) from a colleague two years before Lucy’s death. Gun owners over the age of 21 are not required to obtain training or a licence in Texas, one of the most firearms-friendly US states.
Her inquest in Cheshire was told that Lucy had expressed concern to friends about her two younger siblings being in the house with her father’s Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
On the morning of her death, Lucy and her father argued about sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, who was about to start his second term as US president.
Littler said Lucy had asked her father: “How would you feel if that was me and then the guy got away with it?”
Harrison had replied that it “wouldn’t bother me that much” because his two younger daughters live with him, Littler said. Lucy “went into floods of tears and ran upstairs”, he added, and sent her father links to news articles about the Trump allegations, denied by the US president.
Littler had been in a relationship with Lucy for five years by that point and had known her since they were 12. “This was the sort of stuff that happened on a regular basis,” Littler said. When he met Harrison in Prosper for the first time a year earlier, he told Lucy he did not want to go back. “You’d feel like you’re on eggshells.”
Coates is keen to stress that Lucy was not shot “because they’d had an argument about Trump”. Passionate debates were not uncommon between Lucy and her father: “It could have been an argument about anything.”
Later that morning, the family were watching children’s television shows and preparing to go to the airport when Harrison took Lucy’s hand and escorted her to his bedroom.
Harrison’s wife, Heather, looked at Littler in surprise and joked: “He never takes my hand like that.” “It was mysterious,” Littler said. “No one knew what was going on.”
Then came the loud bang. Initially they thought it was a prank, then Harrison screamed for his wife. They ran into the room and saw Lucy on the floor. Harrison, in shock, could not say what had happened. The pistol was on the bed. He stammered: “I don’t know, I don’t know. Call an ambulance.”
Bodycam footage shows Harrison telling officers he had shown his gun to Lucy when “it just went off”.
“When I pulled it out, it went off,” he said.
Despite an officer smelling alcohol on Harrison’s breath, he was not breathalysed. He initially denied drinking that day but later told police he had a drink problem and “keeps it going”, an admission an officer understood to mean that Harrison drinks throughout the day.
CCTV obtained by police showed Harrison buying two 500ml cartons of wine earlier that day and discarding one of them outside a shop. He later admitted drinking that morning.
During his police interview, a Texas ranger explained to Harrison that the “gun would only discharge if the trigger was pressed”, according to a report released to the UK inquest. “Kris said ‘OK’,” it noted. Yet authorities said they were unable to arrest Harrison because they could not prove intent.
Coates said she had told a Texas ranger that Harrison must have been pointing the gun at Lucy and pulled the trigger, to which she said he had agreed, but argued: “We just can’t prove it.”
On the same call in March 2025, a prosecutor said they were unable to conclude Harrison pointed the weapon at Lucy “because that implies intent”, Coates said. They told her the most they could say was that the “muzzle was aligned with Lucy’s chest and a trigger was pulled”.
The police case was handed to a grand jury in Collin County, Texas, which decided in June last year Harrison should not be prosecuted. Its reasoning, and the evidence it considered, has not been made public.
Littler was also taken to the police station. While waiting to learn whether Lucy had survived, he said he heard a muffled conversation between officers in which they referred to the shooting as an “accident”.
“The police just took Kris’s word for it,” said Coates. “The investigation was not rigorous or thorough enough.”
She suspects the police would have treated Lucy’s death more seriously had it happened in a less “white middle-class prosperous area”.
Of all the disturbing details they have learned, one of the most painful for Coates is that Lucy’s body was tested for alcohol and other substances – all with negative results – while Harrison was not even breathalysed. “That’s what we find absolutely incredulous,” Coates said. She and Littler have submitted formal complaints to Prosper police department.
In February, the senior coroner for Cheshire, Jacqueline Devonish, ruled that firing a pistol at Lucy from across the room was an act of gross negligence and that her death could not be considered accidental.
Coates said the family had been let down, not just by the Texas authorities but also by the British government. She was told the Foreign Office would not be able to help them because nobody had been prosecuted.
Sarah Hall, the Labour MP for Warrington South, said the family did not have “adequate support” and called on the government to press the Texas authorities to re-examine the case.
Coates hopes the new prime minister, who represents the nearby Makerfield constituency, will take up Lucy’s case with the US. She is keen to meet Ed Miliband, the new foreign secretary, to discuss how the government could better support the families of those killed abroad.
“At the beginning, nobody was there for us apart from Sarah Hall,” she said. “We have got hope that this new cabinet and the foreign secretary will support us, [but] there were no authorities supporting us as British nationals wanting justice for a British citizen who was killed by a British citizen.”
A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Our thoughts remain with Jane and her family for the tragic loss they have suffered, and we will always look to learn lessons from cases such as this one to improve the consular support we offer to other families in the future.”
