Girl Turns Tragedy Into Triumph : Violence: Youth who was paralyzed by a stray gang bullet will take her message of hope to Washington for Clinton’s inauguration.

Fourteen-year-old Cindy Rodriguez’s life took a tragic turn on April 29, 1991, when a stray bullet from a gang shootout hit her in the side, leaving her left leg paralyzed and confining her to a wheelchair--possibly for the rest of her life.

On Saturday, the girl marked another notable date, this time auspicious and exciting: the day she boarded a plane to Washington to attend the inauguration of President-elect Bill Clinton.

“I’m excited, you know,” she said as she waited at a gate in Los Angeles International Airport with her mother, Maria Rodriguez, who is traveling with her. “But I’m nervous because I’m going to meet the President and everybody knows him and has seen him on TV.”

Cindy will be among hundreds of youngsters to represent the nation’s many “faces of hope” at the inauguration ceremonies taking place over the next week. During her seven days in Washington, Cindy said she will attend eight balls and speak to a group of youngsters about the dangers of gang violence.

The four gowns she will wear at the balls, the airline tickets, the hotel accommodations and the new wheelchair she will take with her have been donated by companies and individuals who heard about her from a Los Angeles-based foundation designed to help children and adult victims of gang violence.

TEARS (To Educate All Responsible Societies) International, a nonprofit organization formed last year, wrote to Clinton’s inaugural committee, telling the panel about Cindy and the need for the President to address the problems of gang violence.

“I really want to tell him about my story and about all this violence here in Los Angeles and to ask him to put programs that will get kids off the streets,” Cindy said.

Cindy said she will tell Clinton about the day she was shot. About how she and her older sister Nancy had gone outside their family’s apartment in South-Central Los Angeles to pick up mail when she heard shots. About how she woke up in the hospital a few days later to learn she was paralyzed.

Doctors said at the time that the bullet had severed her spinal cord and damaged a kidney.

After Cindy was released from the hospital, she said she felt that her life was over. She had dreamed about being a model--a dream she concluded could probably never be realized from a wheelchair.

But then she began to talk to other victims of gang violence who were paralyzed but were leading productive lives.

“At first when I got shot, I thought, ‘my life’s over,’ but I met lots of other (paralyzed) people who are working and I started feeling better,” Cindy said.

Now she talks about graduating from high school and becoming a computer programmer. She said doctors have told her there is a chance she may walk again.

Her mother said Cindy has braved the tragedy well. But she does not share her daughter’s optimism that getting a new President will make a difference.

“The President has so much to worry about,” Maria Rodriguez said in Spanish. “I don’t think he can help.”

But then she stopped and said that, if she could talk to Clinton, she would ask him to “try to do something for the youth. . . . He should put them to work so they won’t be doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”