DENVER • Parked near the intersection of Oro Blanco Drive and North Carefree Circle in Colorado Springs, Suzanne McKinney was had just tucked her 3-year-old daughter into the child seat in her car when another car slammed into her, pinning her between the two vehicles.

McKinney lost half her left leg in that October 2007 crash. The Peyton resident, a nurse and single mom, said she has struggled not just with her injury, which has required 14 surgeries, but with her job and her four children at home.

Because the other driver was texting on his cell phone at the time of the crash, McKinney was in the state Capitol on Tuesday, offering emotional testimony in support of a bill that would forbid texting and most other hands-on uses of cell phones by drivers in Colorado.

“I don’t understand the waste,” she said tearfully. “It’s a waste of life.”

Shelley Forney of Fort Collins offered equally wrenching testimony about her 9-year-old daughter, Erica, who was killed last November by a driver talking on a cell phone.

Under the bill, the only allowed cell phone use for the general driving public would be with a hands-free device or when life or safety is at risk. Drivers of emergency vehicles would be exempt; partial exemptions would be granted to truckers and HAM radio operators.

First-time violators would face a $50 fine.

The bill, HB-1094 sponsored by Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, advanced to the House Appropriations Committee on a 9-2 vote of the House Transportation and Energy Committee.

Both of the committee members from the Pikes Peak region, Reps. Michael Merrifield, D-Colorado Springs, and Marsha Looper, R-Calhan, voted in favor.

Levy cited a National Safety Council statistic indicating that people operating cell phones were four times more likely to be in a crash, and a study indicating that test subjects were less coordinated when using a cell phone than when their blood alcohol level exceeded the legal .08-percent limit.

The Colorado State Patrol, doctors, motorcyclists, bicyclists, spokeswomen for Verizon Wireless and State Farm Insurance, and even a cell-phone-addicted real estate agent testified on behalf of the bill. Extrapolating a study from California, one of six states that have similar laws already on the books, one speaker, a physician, estimated that the bill would save 40 lives a year in Colorado.

Although the California study found a significant hands-free safety gain in bad weather, none of those speaking in favor of the bill pointed to data showing that drivers using hands-free devices were consistently safer than those holding cell phones to their ears.

But Levy and others said the bill was a necessary step in slowing the proliferation of distracted drivers on Colorado’s roads and highways.

Levy dismissed the “nanny-state” argument that the law would be an excessive infringement on personal liberty.

“If the only consequence of using a cell phone were possible injury to the person who’s talking on the phone, I might not be here,” she said. “But your individual decision whether to talk and drive does not just affect you. It affects every other person on the highway.”

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Contact the writer: 476-1654 or dean.toda@gazettedev.gazette.com

An assortment of colored “Sweethearts” candy are held in bulk prior to packaging at the New England Confectionery Company in Revere, Mass, Wednesday Jan. 14, 2009. Photo by (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Charles Krupa