North Wales Disabled Shopper in Parking Row

A DISABLED shopper who parked in a family parking space found a note on her windscreen saying “Disabled people are scum”.

Wheelchair user Jeanette Stonely was left in tears after the hate mail was left on her car outside a supermarket.

The 65-year-old is a blue badge holder, and uses a wheelchair to get around because of an injury suffered when she was shot in the leg.

She said she’d parked in a parent and child space at Tesco Llandudno Junction as all the disabled spaces were full.

Mrs Stonely tried to explain there were no spaces in the disabled bays and that she could not walk very well.

But the unknown shopper was “very rude”, and said ‘No wonder you are in that wheelchair”.

The woman continued to shout verbal abuse as the Stonelys went into the store, shouting “You disgust me, you disgust me”.

Mrs Stonely was still very upset and crying as she shopped.

When the couple got back to their car they found a note on their windscreen declaring “Disabled People are Scum”.

Last night Tesco urged customers to be “polite and civil” rather than “rude and abusive”.

The Stonelys said Customer Services staff at the store were “very sympathetic”, when they handed over the note from the car.

Mrs Stonely, of Upper Colwyn Bay, has mobility problems after being accidentally shot in the leg in 1958.

Mrs Stonely said: “To me, scum are people with knives and guns on the streets and not someone who takes a parking space.”

Daughter Helen Owen, of Porthmadog said the family would like to know if the woman who followed her mum into the store is the same person who left the note.

She said: “Why did she cause such a scene and shout abuse?”

“This is not the way to act in public, especially if her own children were close by enabling them to witness her behaviour. I was shocked and disgusted.”

Mrs Stonely, a retired practice manager at a Colwyn Bay dental surgery, was left disabled after suffering a freak shotgun injury aged 15 in 1958.

She had been riding a friend’s horse called Gypsy near Stratford upon Avon.

She said she returned the horse to a wooden stable in a field.

But there was a double-barrelled shotgun propped up against the outside wall.

The vibration of the movement of the horse made it slide down it and went off.

The bullet smashed into her right leg above the knee.

She said: “It went in one side and came out the other side. The friend jumped bare back on the horse and went across two fields to a farmhouse to raise the alarm.

“I nearly lost all my blood and I almost died.

“I thought my leg might have to be amputated.

“There was only a mangled artery.

“But my friend used my school scarf as a tournequet and the leg was packed in ice and saved.

“There was no air ambulance and the paramedics had to come across several fields.

“I had to have 14 operations, bone grafts and skin grafts.