PC Andrew Harper’s widow Lissie ‘finds love with another emergency worker’ four years after his tragic death
PC Andrew Harper's widow has "found love with another emergency worker" four years after his tragic death.
Lissie, 32, devastatingly lost her husband in the line of duty when we was responding to a burglary just four weeks after the pair wed.
Andrew, who was just 28 at the time, was dragged behind a getaway van at 60mph for more than a mile when he tried to stop three teens stealing a quad bike.
The horror in 2019 saw his clothes and body armour ripped away on the country roads of Sulhamstead, Berkshire.
Andrew suffered "absolutely catastrophic, unsurvivable injuries” which saw Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, both 17 at the time, and Henry Long, 19, jailed for a total of 42 years.
A fourth defendant, Thomas King, was also sentenced in 2020 to two years after he admitted conspiracy to steal a quad bike.
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Andrew was the first police officer to die on duty since Westminster PC Keith Palmer in March 2017.
In a bid to try and move on from the heartbreak, widow Lissie has since got into a new relationship.
Lissie told podcast The Stigma of Grief that she felt a pressure to be seen as constantly grieving - but had "to find happiness again".
She said: “There’s this expectation to be this figure, the grieving widow... like we’re expected to wear black for the rest of our lives and sit and mourn. It’s not sustainable... and it’s not fair.
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"And although some people resign themselves to being alone for ever, that’s not the case for me.
"It’s normal to feel scared and wonder if you’re doing the right thing.
"It’s a common feeling of 'Do I deserve to feel happy again?' 'Am I betraying the person I love who isn’t here?'
“It’s not going to be the same, it’s not going to be better or worse, it’s just going to be different and that’s been really important for me to find that again.
"There’s no right or wrong time, no matter what anyone else says.”
After meeting Andrew at the age of 16, Lissie said the first date she went on with her new partner did feel "strange" but she needed to take that leap.
She added: "You become a different person when you go through something like this.
"You kind of grow out of the person you were before because you have no choice.”
Lissie, from Oxford, said the fact her new partner is a 999 worker makes it easier for him to understand her tragic ordeal.
Following Andrew's death, Lissie started to fight to change the law and began campaigning for Harper's Law.
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After successfully winning her battle, Harper's Law was introduced.
It now means anyone who unlawfully kills emergency workers while committing an offence - including police, fire or emergency medical workers - are jailed for life.