When Mableton’s Green Room Martial Arts sent a team to the Tony Young All Star Nationals on March 5, Lennie Orrell was a featured competitor. Green Room’s owner, Charles Klughart, recruited Orrell because he thought he had the makings of a champion. Orrell did not disappoint, placing first in board-breaking and second in sparring.

What makes this achievement especially remarkable is that Orell has a prosthetic right leg.

At age 34, Orrell is brimming with optimism. For him, the trophies he won represent how far he has come and how much closer he is to realizing his dreams.

This is far different from the future he imagined in 1996 when he woke up in a Philadelphia hospital room after spending six months in a coma. Orrell had been shot multiple times at point blank range. The right side of his body was paralyzed. He could not walk, speak or feed himself, and his right leg had been amputated below the knee.

He was 19 at the time and a victim of his own lifestyle.

“I was living that life– the gang life,” Orrell says. “I was introduced to it when I was 13, and I got ‘jumped-in’ when I was 14.”

“Jumping in” refers to the ritual beating he received at the hands of his fellow gang members as part of his initiation. Once accepted by the gang, he quickly rose through the ranks. By the age of 19, he was a leader within the organization. He also had a wife and children, and he defended his lifestyle by saying he did it to provide them with a future.

But after he was shot on May 5, 1996, that future disappeared.

Sitting in a wheelchair, dependent on others, Orrell felt vulnerable and afraid. Though he had limited use of his own body, he still lived in gang territory and still had the same associates and enemies, some of whom might still be out for his blood.

“When I picked up a gun again, and I was sitting in a wheelchair, I was afraid,” he recalls. “How was I supposed to protect myself or my family?”

Loaded with pain medication, Orrell passed the time watching martial arts films featuring his boyhood heroes, Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.

“I wanted to be like them,” he says, “but how was I going to do that with just one leg?”

It was while learning to walk with his new prosthesis that Orrell had his first glimpse of hope.

“There was this guy who had been in a motorcycle accident,” he says. “He was also an amputee, but he took no pain medication. I asked him how he was able to do that, and he said that he studied Tai Chi, and that it helped him control the pain. I said, ‘Tai Chi, isn’t that a martial art?’”

Orrell began taking informal lessons from the man. In time, he found that his balance and coordination improved and that he was taking less pain medication.

But there was still the problem of his environment.

“One day around Christmas, my daughter came to me and said ‘Daddy, do you know what I prayed for? I prayed that nobody would ever try to murder you again.’

“I knew right then that I had to get out. I moved to Oklahoma with nothing but $4, a bus ticket and a backpack. I did it to save my life. If I had stayed in Philly, I would have ended up dead or in prison.”

In Oklahoma, Orrell turned to his faith for support. While sitting in church one Sunday, he heard God speaking to him.

“I felt like God was saying he wanted to make my name known, so that he could use me to speak to people. I told my pastor that.”

His pastor wanted to know how he thought God was going to accomplish this.

“I’m going to become a martial arts champion,” he answered.

Little did he know that his pastor was a former martial arts instructor. A week later, Orrell’s pastor announced that he was reopening his dojo. For the next six years, he trained Orrell in the art of Tae Kwon Do.

When Orrel moved to Georgia with his current wife, Cassandra, he began looking for another teacher. Although he studied Brazilian Jujitsu at Toe Two Toe Fitness in Villa Rica, he was still searching when encountered Klughart by chance.

“My wife and I were at the mall, and Charles was there giving out fliers [for his new location on Veterans Memorial Highway]. He came up behind me, and I sort of spun around on him. It was a habit from the old days. He said ‘Hold on, son!’”

The two men began talking. When Orrell told Klughart that he had studied Tae Kwon Do, Klughart asked him if he wanted to train for competition.

“That struck home with me, because I really wanted to compete. But because of my background, I’m slow to trust people, so I turned him down.”

Klughart persisted, and eventually Orrell agreed to come out and see the dojo at Green Room Martial Arts.

“When I went there and felt the environment and saw how close they were, I got excited. I told my wife I had found the right people and the right place.”

Orrell has been training with a special prosthesis, custom-made by Will Holbrook of Atlanta Prosthetics and Orthotics, Inc.

Orrell plans on becoming an instructor – a goal that the Klugharts can help him achieve. He wants to open his own dojo specifically for training others with disabilities. He also wants to build on his success in martial arts as a platform for speaking to young people about gangs.

“If you’re telling people to come out of the gang life, you have to offer them somewhere else to go.”

Orrell has had his first success in this as well, being invited to speak at Dobbins Middle School in Powder Springs.

“A true champion is a champion whether he wins or loses,” Orrell says. “A lot of people in my condition are still lying on the couch flipping channels. Sure, there are days when I want to throw my prosthesis across the room. But I don’t regret what happened to me. It saved my life. Whenever I think something is too hard, or that I can’t take it anymore, I think back to the day I woke up from the coma, or to the day my physical therapist told me I would stay in that wheelchair forever if I didn’t make myself get up out of it.”

Orrell drives his point home with a favorite quote: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”