'Get off the f***ing road': Young woman with disability abused by driver
A young woman with cerebral palsy and her friend claim they were yelled at by an “inconsiderate” driver who told them to “get off the f***ing road” in a shopping centre car park in Brisbane.
On Sunday morning Bella Busine, 25, had been helping her friend Bri Condon, 22, who is completely reliant on her wheelchair, when the incident occurred.
In a post shared online, Ms Busine explained they didn’t have a wheelchair-accessible car so they walked to their local shopping centre to buy food and get out of the house.
Ms Busine said there were three ramps to enter the shops and all of them led to the car park. She added two of them were too steep to use.
“It isn’t long to walk through the car park and we try to go quickly and stay to the left. Most people are considerate,” she wrote online.
She said no one had ever appeared to have an issue before, but on Sunday they experienced a female driver she described as “beyond inconsiderate”.
“They chose to beep the horn (so loudly it could have caused a seizure) and to yell at us through the window ‘to stay on the (non-existent) footpath’ and to ‘get off the f***ing road’,” Ms Busine’s online post explained.
The 25-year-old described it as “really scary” for herself and for her friend Bri.
“I was so taken aback and we were both shaking with shock,” she said.
The pair wanted to approach the driver about what she had done.
“We wanted to talk to her – not to cause a fight but to ask her why she felt the need to do that,” Ms Busine told Yahoo7.
While the pair did not speak to her, the story was shared online in a bid to get people to think before they act.
“We did it because we want people to stop and to think when they’re impatient and angry, and to think what their actions are going to result in,” Ms Busine said.
“(It’s) our way of trying to turn our negative experience into a positive one.”
Their online post about the incident has received close to 250 reactions, and Ms Busine said they had received the most overwhelming response which has been largely “very positive”.
“We are so sad to hear that you had this happen, there are some really horrible people, and you girls wrote about this horrible first-hand experience so beautifully and with respect … well done both of you,” one woman wrote on Facebook.
Another woman said the driver’s behaviour was “disgusting”, while another labelled the driver as a “miserable piece of work”.
“I know I do not always know how to react to people with disabilities, but I work on it, and I NEVER get angry at them,” another person commented.
