Wheelchair Theft Spurs Outpouring of Offers : Charity: Hundreds of people have responded to the plight of the 4-year-old who lost her mobility when her customized equipment was stolen. She has cerebral palsy.

A wheelchair apparently stolen this week from a handicapped 4-year-old poster child has yet to be recovered, but response to the Norwalk child’s plight has been overwhelming, the family said Thursday.

Rebecca Braden, whose daughter, Amanda, suffers from cerebral palsy, said that by late Thursday afternoon, more than 30 people had offered them wheelchairs.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other people--from the owners of a country-Western dance hall in Riverside to an anonymous motorcyclist who roared up to a local charity with $5--have offered donations with which to replace the motorized chair and secure the porch from which it was stolen Monday night, she said.

“I am just so grateful, I don’t even know what to say,” said Braden, who lives with her husband and two children in a Norwalk trailer park. She said the family will determine by this weekend which wheelchair they will borrow and how best to replace the estimated $5,000 worth of equipment believed stolen.

Any remaining donations will be funneled into a trust for the child; the program for the handicapped at Nuffer Elementary School in Norwalk, where she is enrolled; the United Cerebral Palsy Spastic Children’s Foundation in Van Nuys, and a special scholarship fund for disabled children that has been set up by the foundation, according to Braden and foundation officials.

Braden said police continue to search for the pint-sized, purple-and-black wheelchair and other customized equipment missing from the family’s porch. Meanwhile, she and the foundation are keeping a list of donors “so that I can call each person and thank them personally, and let them know where their money went,” Braden said.

Debbie Lindner, director of development at the foundation in Van Nuys, said donations have come from people in “every walk of life.”

“We got a letter in today with a dollar bill in it that said, ‘This is all I can do, but I hope it helps,’ ” Lindner said. “One guy drove up on a motorcycle, threw five dollars on our desk and walked out.”

Times readers who called asking how they could donate were equally diverse, ranging from the father of a child who recently died of AIDS at age 7 to a laid-off construction worker who read about the Bradens “and figured my life wasn’t so bad after all.”

Braden said a country-Western dance hall in Riverside has offered to add a screened porch onto the family’s trailer so Amanda will have a safe place to play and to keep her wheelchair.

According to Braden and police, the wheelchair has been missing since about 10 p.m. Monday, the time Rebecca Braden had routinely set the chair out on the porch with other gear that the child would need for school the next day.

At 6 a.m., when she awoke to get Amanda and her brother off to school, the chair was gone, as were the child’s walker, helmet, leg braces, hand splints and Little Mermaid backpack.

The chair, the mother said, was essential to the child’s mobility, and to her duties as a United Cerebral Palsy poster child.