Senior warns of walking texters after suffering broken bones

An 82-year-old Saint John woman is warning about the dangers of texting while walking after she was knocked to the ground by someone distracted by a smartphone in a local shopping mall last July.

"All of a sudden I was on the ground and whoever it was just left me there," laying on the floor with a fractured hip and badly broken foot, said Rita Enman.

Since then, Enman has been in and out of hospitals, undergoing surgeries, and now relies on a walker or a cane to get around.

But she has started physiotherapy and is optimistic about dancing at her granddaughter's wedding, which she is hosting at the family home in August.

"It's still a process. He said it would probably be six months before I would be walking fairly good — without a limp, hopefully," she said.

Enman says she didn't even realize what had happened to her at the time, but there were witnesses.

"The [McAllister Place mall] security guard said she was texting and she had her head down," she said.

Now, Enman says, it seems everywhere she looks people are texting while on the move.

"I don't know, it just upsets me," she said. "There is a lot of it going on."

She worries people don't realize how dangerous it can be.

Enman still doesn't know who knocked her over. The woman who ran into her did not stop. David Greene, general manager of McAllister Place, says the incident was not captured by any of the mall's surveillance cameras.

Enman insists she's not looking for any compensation. All she wants is an apology for her suffering.