Nearly two years after a Texas father fatally shot his 23-year-old daughter following an argument about Donald Trump, her mother is still trying to get answers, and a new report raises questions about how police handled the case.
Kris Harrison has never faced charges in the Jan. 10, 2025, killing of his daughter, Lucy Harrison, but Texas Monthly reported reported that several parts of the shooter's account went unchallenged, and the slain woman's mother is trying to present prosecutors with new evidence in hopes that they'll reopen the investigation.
On the day of the shooting, Lucy and her father had argued about Trump, who was days from his second inauguration, and an officer who arrived at the home smelled alcohol on Harrison’s breath. He first denied drinking, then admitted he was a recovering alcoholic who had relapsed and had started on wine before breakfast.
Footage from a nearby 7-Eleven showed him buying two wine cartons about two and a half hours before the shooting and drinking from one outside, but police never gave him a Breathalyzer or took a blood sample.
Harrison also said he was standing next to Lucy, who lived in England and had been visiting he father for the holidays, by the bed when the gun fired, but a forensic sketch of the scene shows her body about seven feet from the bed, a discrepancy that went unaddressed.
According to a detective’s report, when asked whether he had put his finger on the trigger, Harrison said he didn’t remember but “must have done so in the process of picking it up.”
“Once someone is lying to you about something as simple as whether you’ve been drinking or not, you’ve got to start questioning,” said Craig Miller, a former Dallas police detective who reviewed the file. “We know guns don’t just go off. Somebody has to pull the trigger.”
Lucy's her mother, Jane Coates, believes a yearlong coroner’s inquest in Cheshire, England, where Lucy lived, turned up the kind of new evidence needed to reopen the case.
After reviewing the American police file and hearing from nearly a dozen witnesses, including a written statement from Harrison, a senior British coroner ruled in February that Lucy’s death was an “unlawful killing on the grounds of gross negligence manslaughter.”
The coroner acknowledged that Harrison likely didn’t know the gun was loaded, but wrote that “to shoot her through the chest whilst she was standing would have required him to have been pointing the gun at his daughter without checking for bullets, and pulling the trigger.” The coroner also concluded that Harrison “had been drinking continuously” that day.
According to Texas Monthly, the inquest also brought out testimony that contradicted much of what Harrison told Texas detectives.
Lucy’s boyfriend, Sam Littler, testified that she had a strained relationship with her father because of what he called his “controlling behavior and emotional abuse," and he described the argument over Trump’s civil case involving E. Jean Carroll that left Lucy in tears that morning, an exchange that never came up in Harrison’s police interview.
According to Littler, Lucy asked her father how he would feel if she were raped, and he allegedly replied, “I have two other daughters who actually live with me, so I wouldn’t really care.”
It’s unclear whether U.S. investigators knew about the argument.
The ruling has no practical effect in the U.S., and because the shooting happened in Texas, Harrison can’t be prosecuted in Britain.
Last month, Coates flew from England to Texas seeking meetings with prosecutors and police, but she was repeatedly turned away.
“I just wanted to sit with the investigators and with the DA,” she said, “for them to look me in the eye and tell me how this investigation was rigorous and thorough.”
Prosper police told Texas Monthly that they “conducted a thorough and complete investigation.” Harrison could not be reached for comment.