Mean Thief : Little Girl’s New Wheelchair Taken

The family of a 4-year-old child with cerebral palsy is seeking the public’s help in recovering the little girl’s pint-size wheelchair, stolen this week from the porch of their Norwalk home.

Amanda Braden, a poster child for the United Cerebral Palsy Spastic Children’s Foundation of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, had the purple and black wheelchair for two weeks before it disappeared, her mother said.

“We’ve checked dumpsters, pawnshops, riverbeds, everywhere, but nothing has turned up,” said Rebecca Braden. The motorized chair and other equipment that was taken with it are worth at least $5,000, she said. And they will take months to replace, even if the order is rushed.

“The police comed, but they didn’t get the guy and they can’t find the wheelchair,” the tiny blond girl chimed in. “They just comed over to my house and they just took it, and now I can’t go outside and play.”

Braden, who lives with her husband and two children in a trailer park, said she had put the wheelchair out on the porch at about 10 Monday night, as she does every school night, along with all the other gear Amanda needs for school.

“Her braces, helmet, kneepads, backpack--I put it all out there so that all I have to do is strap her in and get her out the door in the morning,” Braden said.

She said she has never worried that the wheelchair might be stolen because the park is set back from the street and Amanda is known to virtually all her neighbors.

But at 6 a.m., when Braden awoke to get Amanda and her 6-year-old son, Drew, off to school, the chair was missing, as were her walker, her pink and beige helmet, her leg braces, her hand splints and her blue Little Mermaid backpack.

“At first, I thought one of the kids had taken it down to play with it,” Braden said. But as the day wore on without a sign of the wheelchair, she became concerned and called authorities.

Although the family has health insurance, it only covers replacement of Amanda’s equipment every two years, she said, “and we just got it back from being customized last week.”

Sgt. Matthew McDannel of the Norwalk Sheriff’s station said flyers have been distributed throughout the trailer park asking for information on the theft. But so far, he said, detectives have no leads.

“We can guess it may have been kids doing a prank, or somebody who took it to resell it, but those are just hunches,” McDannel said.

Susan Clifton, associate director of development with the cerebral palsy foundation in Van Nuys, said the motorized wheelchair was crucial to Amanda’s mobility, adding that she makes frequent appearances at fund-raisers and other events.

In July, for instance, the child attended the John McEnroe Love Match Celebrity Tennis Tournament in Westlake Village. Last spring she was a guest at Michael Jackson’s ranch. She has also appeared on United Cerebral Palsy telethons, and is scheduled to be a featured guest on the upcoming telethon in January.

“She’s just a doll,” Clifton said. “She’s really blossomed in the three years we’ve known her.”

Braden said Amanda--a student at a special program for disabled children at Nuffer Elementary School--has made do this week with a wheelchair and helmet lent to her by school officials. But her own chair was customized so she could maneuver on her own, her mother said; the chair she has been lent is so big and heavy that Amanda cannot handle it without help.

“She had just gotten to the point where she could actually go outside and play with the other kids a little bit,” the mother said. “That was her new big thing, and now without the wheelchair she can’t go out.

“It’s just such a setback for her.”