Girl’s Search for Self Takes Fatal Turn : Shooting: Arrianna Rodriguez, enticed by the fast pace of Los Angeles, decided to come to the city by herself. She was 14 when a bullet ended her life.

Arrianna Rodriguez loved purple. The energetic 14-year-old wore purple jeans, owned purple teddy bears and even painted her nails purple. So when she was killed in a drive-by shooting three weeks ago near USC, Arrianna’s family knew they would bury her in a purple dress.

At Arrianna’s funeral in Lynwood, her 17-year-old sister peered into the purple casket and saw a plastic band around Arrianna’s wrist. The blue band, attached by workers in the California Hospital emergency room, read “Jane Doe.” Sasha Rodriguez asked the funeral director to remove it.

“She was not Jane Doe,” Sasha said. “She was someone. She was my little sister.”

In a county that averages seven homicides a day, Arrianna Rodriguez’s death might easily be lost among statistics, just another Jane Doe. But numbers do not tell the real story of her life and her tragedy.

Arrianna, headstrong and independent, became bored with life in Nevada and wound up living with a 16-year-old girlfriend in a rented room in South-Central three months ago. Arrianna, like other children who grow up quickly, was seduced by the fast life and excitement of her hometown of Los Angeles.

“This city swallowed up my baby. She became the environment,” said her mother, Deborah Rodriguez.

On Oct. 11, a bullet struck Arrianna’s forehead just above the left eye as she and a 16-year-old friend sat in a parked car in the 1200 block of West 36th Place. Shots were fired from a passing car carrying three people, police said. Arri, as her friends and family called her, died 49 minutes later.

Her friend was unharmed in the attack. A 25-year-old man standing next to her car was hit several times, but survived.

Officers called Arri’s killing gang-related but provided little other information, saying they did not want to jeopardize their investigation. As police search for the person they believe pulled the trigger, Arri’s loved ones look for their own answers.

Deborah Rodriguez said her youngest daughter was a loving, tender child who, from ages 2 to 9, followed her around the house like a shadow.

“I had to sneak out if I wanted to go somewhere,” Rodriguez said in her hotel room near Los Angeles International Airport, three days after her daughter’s funeral. “Whenever I left, you’d never seen a child cry like that. My mother told me she’d never seen a child so in love with her mother.”

But when Arri reached early adolescence, she went from a dependent little girl to a determined youth in search of her own identity. Rodriguez said her daughter changed gradually, starting first with her language when she was 11: “She started speaking like kids on the street. She wanted to be hip. Then she started acting like those kids.”

Added her sister, Sasha: “She was real sweet when she was little, but she kind of changed later. She wanted a car, a pager, a lot of jewelry and clothing. She had a smart mouth and an attitude. But you could always make her laugh and smile.”

Clutching a collage of photographs of Arri, Sasha recalled simpler days living at the home of her grandmother, Rosa Guyot, at West 51st Street and Normandie Avenue. Surrounded by uncles, aunts and cousins, Rodriguez and her daughters spent five years in a nurturing and loving environment.

“Those were the best days of our lives,” Sasha said. “Twelve of us lived in a four-bedroom house, but it never seemed crowded. We were one big happy family.”

But the family would soon splinter.

After the grandmother sold her house in 1988, the extended family went in different directions. Rodriguez moved with her two daughters many times throughout Southern California. She and Arri eventually wound up in Las Vegas about a year ago to live near Rodriguez’s sister, Heidi, who said Nevada was a safe, inexpensive place to live. Sasha remained in Pomona, living with a friend.

Rodriguez and her children received monthly stipends from Social Security since Rodriguez’s husband and the girls’ father, Benito, killed himself accidentally while cleaning his pistol in 1981. Rodriguez also has worked part time in a clothing boutique.

Four months ago, Arri visited Sasha in Pomona and decided to stay in California despite her mother’s pleas to her to return to Las Vegas. She lived with Sasha for a while and then rented a room with a friend in South-Central. Rodriguez said she would send Arri $150 a month.

“She liked the fast life of Los Angeles, liked hanging around guys with beepers,” Rodriguez said. “I think it was peer pressure. She stopped calling me Mommy, and began calling me Debbie in front of her friends. She was very independent.”

Arri had finished the eighth grade in Las Vegas, but was not enrolled in school in Los Angeles at the time of her death, her mother said. Instead she spent her days with friends, though she never told her mother or sister exactly what she did during the day. After they pressured her, Arri agreed to enroll at Los Angeles High School sometime this semester, Sasha said.

On the day she died, Rodriguez spoke to Arri on the phone. “I told her: ‘I miss you, love you and need you to come home. . . . You are too intelligent to let these friends of yours bring you down,’ ” Rodriguez said. Arri sniffled a few times on the phone and was perhaps, Rodriguez thought, beginning to change her mind about living in Los Angeles.

When asked why she let her 14-year-old child live hundreds of miles away with a stranger, Rodriguez said, “I was one of those mothers (who thought) that if I let her do what she wanted, she’d eventually realize on her own that she needed to be near her mom.

“I didn’t know how to pull her back. I’ve heard people tell me to go snatch her back, but I was afraid I’d lose her and she’d run away for good. I just tried to keep the line of communication open.”

Rodriguez said she has considered suicide to free herself from the pain of Arri’s death but has not because of Sasha. “I wouldn’t want her to have to go through the pain of losing me. I’ve got to be here for her . . . but it’s hard.”

Arri’s godmother, Benease Howard, said she believes Arri died for a reason. “God took her so she wouldn’t have to suffer in this world. Kids nowadays have no concern for each other. It’s so easy to pick up a gun and shoot each other.”

Crowded in the small Chapel of Sacred Memories in Lynwood, 70 friends and relatives gathered to pay their respects before Arri was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills.

Standing before the crowd, Sasha shared a poem she had written. Struggling through tears and moans, she read:

To know I won’t see you again kills me inside.

It’s so obvious , Arri, I can no longer hide.

I tried to be strong for you and for me.

But I’m weak knowing together again we will no longer be.

A day after the funeral, Sasha said, “Nothing will make us feel better. Not prison or even the death penalty. They took something special from this family, and they caused a lot of pain and confusion.”