A woman was severely injured after she was thrown off her horse on a trail in Ipswich, Massachusetts. She said a man on a mountain bike spooked the horse, which later died.

"It's unfortunate that I'm so incapacitated right now," Rosie Kennedy said from her bed at a rehab facility in Beverly Wednesday.

Back on November 21, she was riding her 8-year-old horse "Pops" on a trail in Ipswich, when she said a man on a mountain bike zipped past some railroad tracks and turned onto the trail.

"Pops just lost his mind, he was just terrified. He reared and he spun, and he started to gallop," Kennedy said. She was thrown to the ground and dragged about 10 feet.

"The last thing I remember is hearing Pops galloping away at warp speed, and I never saw him again," she said through tears. While injured on the ground, Kennedy said she asked the cyclist to identify himself.

"I was probably not polite at that time, I said 'What are you doing riding along railroad tracks?' I said it three times and he just left," she recalled.

Crawled 30 minutes to get help   

Kennedy managed to take a photo of him. She then crawled for a half hour to get back to the barn, where an ambulance picked her up. Pops was found on a farm nearby with life-threatening injuries. A veterinarian determined it was more humane to put him down. 

Kennedy ended up with a shattered left ankle and a severely damaged right knee. She said the physical injuries pale in comparison to the loss of her horse. 

"Sometimes you can't control the situation and then a terrible tragedy occurs," Kennedy said. "It just breaks my heart to think that he ran off running for his life with basically a fatal injury," she said. "That's hard to deal with."

Trail safety awareness

Kennedy chose to speak publicly about the incident to raise awareness about trail safety.

"There have been a lot of bicyclists who've moved in the past five or 10 years and have enjoyed our trails," Kennedy said. "But not every trail is meant for a bicyclist to zoom around corners. Horses have the right of way no matter where they are." 

She added that approaching a horse quickly, whether on a bike or on foot, can be dangerous. 

"Under no circumstances should any bicyclist or any pedestrian ever come up fast behind a horse. That is terrifying to them. And it was terrifying to Pops," Kennedy said. "I think this accident has caused people to think about it very clearly and perhaps make some changes in the way that trails are opened, traversed at home."

Ipswich police said they are looking into the incident, but no charges have been filed at this point in the investigation.