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Miami police search for driver in hit-and-run that left food delivery worker critically injured

Miami police search for driver in hit-and-run that left food delivery worker critically injured

CBS News19-05-2025
Authorities are searching for the driver who struck a woman on a scooter while she was making food deliveries early Saturday morning and then fled the scene.
The victim, Veronica Contreras, 28, remains in critical condition.
Single mom injured while working
The crash happened shortly before 5 a.m. near the intersection of Southwest 7th Street and 8th Avenue, according to police.
Contreras, a food delivery worker and single mother of three, was struck while riding her motorcycle-style scooter.
"She is seriously injured with many fractures to her body. She is now under observation because of her injuries," said her brother, Edwin López.
Lopez shared photos taken hours after the accident and said his sister was working at the time she was hit.
"At the time of the accident, she was working. She's an Uber Eats driver."
Family facing medical, emotional strain
Contreras came to the United States from Nicaragua five years ago to build a better life for her daughters.
"She came here in search of a better life not only for her, but also for her daughters," said López.
Now, the family is struggling to cope with the emotional toll and rising medical costs.
"It's very difficult for us. It's going to be very hard for us to pay for all the medical expenses. Not only is it affecting her physical health, but also her family because they rely on her," added López. For us, family is first, and this has caused us so much pain."
Public asked to help ID driver
City of Miami police are continuing to investigate and are urging anyone with information to come forward. As of now, officials have not released a description of the vehicle involved in the hit-and-run.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Miami Police.
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Spartanburg County Sheriff's candidates sharpen messages ahead of August 19 runoff
Spartanburg County Sheriff's candidates sharpen messages ahead of August 19 runoff

Yahoo

time2 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Spartanburg County Sheriff's candidates sharpen messages ahead of August 19 runoff

With only days to go in the Republican Party primary campaign, the two remaining candidates in the race to become the next Spartanburg County Sheriff are sharpening their respective messages to voters. For Rusty Clevenger, the message is all about experience. He has worked as a deputy in the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office and held the elected position of Spartanburg County Coroner since 2009. Bill Rhyne's message focuses on change. He, too, has been a sheriff's deputy, but Rhyne spent much of his career with the South Carolina Highway Patrol, where he served as the lead public information and community engagement officer. Following the resignation of former Sheriff Chuck Wright in May, Clevenger and Rhyne were among nine candidates to file for the Republican nomination for November's special election. They emerged from the crowded field with the most votes – 7,277 for Rhyne, 6,596 for Clevenger – and are now in a runoff to be held on August 19. The winner will run unopposed in November. Competing messages: Change vs. experience Both candidates said they have been taking their messages door-to-door and to small groups of voters. Clevenger, who has won several countywide races since first running for coroner, wants to convince voters that his experience makes him uniquely qualified to serve as sheriff. As coroner, he has managed a staff, overseen a budget, and worked with members of Spartanburg County Council to plan for the office's needs. His team must be prepared 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 'I have to be accountable,' he said. 'We provide a service for which there is no downtime.' Clevenger added that the coroner works closely with various law enforcement agencies – including the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office – to investigate crimes. This includes crimes involving acts of violence as well as the distribution and use of narcotics. Clevenger said his investigative experience gives him an advantage over Rhyne that he hopes voters will consider. 'Bill doesn't have the narcotics and vice experience, the investigative experience,' he said. 'The expectations are different with the Sheriff's Office than with the Highway Patrol – you're expected to solve crimes and protect people.' Rhyne said the number one thing he's hearing from voters on the campaign trail is 'people in Spartanburg want change. They believe we need a break from the past and a chance to move forward.' When there were nine candidates in the race, change was a theme among several who could credibly claim outsider status. Now, in the two-man race, 'I'm the change candidate,' Rhyne said. He thinks his experience with the Highway Patrol is especially valuable on a couple of fronts. Rhyne said statewide law enforcement agencies are rarely the subject of scandal – unlike the issues at the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office that drove Wright to resign and are currently under investigation. 'That has to do with checks and balances,' he said. 'I can bring those checks and balances to the sheriff's office.' And in his work with community engagement, Rhyne developed strategies for gaining feedback and responding to the concerns of the public. 'Community relations will be important,' he said. 'One of the main things I'm hearing is that people in Spartanburg County want to see officers more engaged in their communities.' Candidates: Unaware of problems under Wright Clevenger and Rhyne said they will work hard to rebuild trust among residents and to repair the relationship between the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office and Spartanburg County Council. But neither said they had been aware of major problems in the sheriff's office during Wright's tenure. Clevenger said his office and the sheriff's office did 'amazing work collaboratively.' He pointed to investigations of the murders committed by Todd Kohlhepp. 'When we worked together, I never had any indication that there was a problem. The experiences I had were great successes. Nobody interfered with our investigations, and things were done by the book.' More: 'It's so disappointing:' Spartanburg County residents react to Chuck Wright's resignation Clevenger added, 'Everything was good until it wasn't good.' Rhyne said he'd heard that the culture in the sheriff's office was akin to 'the wild, wild west.' But he knew of no specific claims of malfeasance on Wright's part. 'The first I heard about things was when everyone else heard it,' he said. Nonetheless, Rhyne had made plans to run for sheriff in 2028 – whether Wright was the incumbent at that point or not. He said he didn't run in 2024 because he was committed to working for the Highway Patrol until February of this year. When the unexpected opportunity to run for Wright's unexpired term arose, he decided to jump in. Support for Trump questioned Rhyne and Clevenger have known one another for years. They have professional and personal connections. The race for sheriff had been conducted on friendly terms – until recently. That's when Clevenger went public with information his campaign obtained from the South Carolina Election Commission, appearing to indicate that Rhyne didn't vote in the 2024 presidential election. Clevenger took the opportunity to suggest that Rhyne wasn't sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump. The allegation was at the top of a checklist of issues on a recent campaign mailer. Rhyne said the claim had made the rounds weeks earlier and that he had discussed the matter with Clevenger and others at the time. He maintained that he had, in fact, voted in the 2024 election – and, yes, supported Trump. Rhyne said he was surprised Clevenger went ahead with the attack because 'we had both agreed on running a clean election.' He said he thinks he has momentum in the race – including recent endorsements from second-place and third-place vote-getters Robert Cheeks and Nick Duncan – and that Clevenger was scrambling for something that might blunt the gathering strength of Rhyne's campaign. In any case, during an August 13 debate televised by Fox Carolina, he presented documentation from the state election commission that he says indicated there had been a mix-up and that he'd signed in as a voter last November. 'It was a mic drop moment' in the debate, Rhyne said. On August 14, the Clevenger campaign released a statement saying that it had made a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the report on whether or not Rhyne had voted in 2024. The information the campaign received was 'the official record.' The news release said that, based on the documentation Rhyne provided during the debate, Clevenger's campaign has been working with elections officials to clarify the situation. 'Keeping with my steadfast belief in ethics and integrity, we have revised our campaign advertising to reflect the new information,' Clevenger said in the news statement. Retaining deputies a top issue for sheriff's office Throughout the campaign, candidates have talked at length about the need to recruit and retain deputies – a concern when it comes to response time and overall effectiveness of the agency. Rhyne and Clevenger agree that increased pay should help – but isn't the only issue. 'If you can work somewhere that's known as the best, then people want to be part of that,' Clevenger said, adding that strong staff policies and training opportunities are part of the equation. He said his experience managing the budget of the Spartanburg Coroner's Office and collaborating with county council members will boost his efforts to secure better pay for deputies. Rhyne said changing the culture of the sheriff's office will be essential to maintaining a strong team. 'People don't leave for money alone,' he said. Still, he thinks staff pay is an issue that must be addressed. 'We can't pay $6,000 less than a county next door,' he said. Rhyne said he would talk with county leaders to explore the possibility of setting aside a portion of fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreements – incentives that reduce taxes but establish set payments for new businesses to locate in the county – in support of salaries for deputies. Other issues: Jail overcrowding, traffic safety, immigration enforcement There are other issues on the minds of candidates and voters alike. In an interview, Clevenger discussed overcrowding at the Spartanburg County Detention Center. He wants to work with judges and prosecutors to assess whether there are inmates who don't truly need to be incarcerated or whose cases can be adjudicated more quickly. 'We need to take a hard look and break down what people have been charged with,' he said. 'I want to examine what programs might foster some of them becoming productive members of society instead of sitting in the jail.' Rhyne said he has heard from voters that they see a need for more active traffic patrol. 'It caught me a little off guard how many people talked about it,' he said. 'But as the county grows and there are more cars on the roads, they see it and it's in their face. It's a huge concern.' Both candidates said they would support federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest illegal immigrants while also working to ensure that Spartanburg County residents who are here legally – or may even be citizens – are not falsely detained as the Trump administration steps up its mass deportation program. The election of a new sheriff will be a first for Spartanburg in more than two decades. Wright defeated incumbent Bill Coffey in 2004. He was most recently reelected in 2024. This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: In runoff for Spartanburg's next sheriff, candidates sharpen messages Solve the daily Crossword

For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One
For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One

New York Times

time5 minutes ago

  • New York Times

For a ‘Twisted Tale,' Amanda Knox and Grace Van Patten Became One

As the title character of the mini-series 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' the actress Grace Van Patten had to convincingly embody a highly examined figure at the center of a real-life legal drama followed by millions. Even more daunting, she had to do it in front of Amanda Knox herself, an executive producer. Those close to Knox were stunned by the results. 'Grace, I haven't told you this yet — when they see you play me, they get chills,' Knox told Van Patten during a conversation with The New York Times last week. 'You just did it, and they were like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'' Van Patten gasped in response. 'It was some fusion that happened,' she said. 'Because a lot of it felt very subconscious to me.' The eight-part series debuts on Hulu on Wednesday. The chills were inspired, Knox said, partly by Van Patten nailing her personality quirks: her occasionally singsong voice, the snort in her laugh, the cha-cha in her step. These behaviors and others became ammunition for Italian prosecutors and the global tabloid machine during Knox's highly publicized trial for the 2007 sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher. Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student and one of Knox's three roommates, was found dead from a knife attack in the flat they shared in Perugia, Italy. Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle native who was studying there, and Raffaele Sollecito, her Italian boyfriend of about a week, were arrested and imprisoned just days after Kercher was found. In 2009, both were convicted of the killing, with Amanda sentenced to 26 years and Sollecito to 25 years. In 2011, the ruling was overturned, and Knox returned to the United States. Then in 2014, Knox and Sollecito (played by Giuseppe Domenico in the series) were re-convicted of murder, a conviction that was overturned in 2015, ending the nearly decade-long saga. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted separately of the murder in 2008 and was released from prison in 2021, after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. (Guede's original 30-year sentence was reduced on appeal.) A separate slander conviction for Knox was upheld earlier this year. She had implicated Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she had worked, and herself in a confession made under duress, which she had tried to withdraw almost immediately. (Lumumba was in jail about two weeks as a result.) In all, Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison. The mini-series recreates this legal roller coaster in an unconventional style. It is a prison drama, a courtroom drama, a love story and an anxious horror tale. And it is largely in Italian. Van Patten ('Nine Perfect Strangers,' 'Tell Me Lies') plays Knox from her 20s, when she was full of 'whimsy and optimism and innocence,' as Knox put it, into her mid-30s, when Knox was defined more by 'trauma and hauntedness and determination.' 'We asked her to play the best experiences of my life and the worst experiences of life,' said Knox, now 38. 'We asked her to do it in English and Italian.' The series also depicts Knox's decision, in 2022, to return to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, her nemesis during and after the trial. Mignini, the lead Italian prosecutor, had fixated on and promoted the image of Knox as a conniving, sex-crazed murderer. (He compared Knox to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, during the proceedings.) Tabloid headlines smeared her as 'Foxy Knoxy,' a childhood nickname lifted from her Myspace page. Onscreen, Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) is a relentless figure, a smug monster to be dreaded. Knox's trip to Italy to face (and ultimately befriend) the prosecutor is used as a framing device in the series. 'This is not a show about the worst experience of someone's life,' Knox said. 'This is the show of a person's choice to find closure on their own terms and to reclaim a sense of agency in their own life after that agency has been stolen from them.' To prepare to play Knox, Van Patten had numerous video chats with her and spent time in Los Angeles with Knox and her two children. Knox was also frequently on set during production. It all helped the actress understand the complex emotions involved in such a nightmarish experience. 'I was able to go to those places because of how deeply open Amanda was and how deeply vulnerable she was with me,' Van Patten said. An interrogation scene, in which Knox is mentally and physically tormented by a team of Italian officials, was particularly intense to film, Van Patten said. (Watching Knox spiral and give way under what amounts to psychological torture is brutal viewing.) Van Patten was learning Italian throughout filming, but the show was largely shot sequentially, and those early scenes captured authentic desperation. 'I tried not to learn the other people's lines as much as I could so that I was in a state of confusion,' she said. Knox said the themes of perception and miscommunication are fundamental to the story. 'That clash of perspectives and cultures and language, and the tension there, that's the beauty of drama and it's the beauty of reality,' she said. 'It is what makes this so psychologically and emotionally complex.' Kercher (Rhianne Barreto) is mostly seen in flashbacks of quiet, playful moments of friendship between her and Knox. The limited screen time reflects real life, in which the media circus around Knox and Sollecito overshadowed Kercher's brutal death. Last year, Stephanie Kercher, Meredith's sister, told The Guardian that she found it 'difficult to understand' what purpose the mini-series would serve. 'Meredith will always be remembered for her own fight for life, and yet in her absence, her love and personality continues to shine,' she said. 'The Twisted Tale' was created by K.J. Steinberg ('This Is Us'), and executive producers included Monica Lewinsky; Knox's husband, Christopher Robinson; and Warren Littlefield ('The Handmaid's Tale'). It was Lewinsky who first approached Knox about dramatizing her experiences. In 2021, Lewinsky worked to reframe her own story as a producer on the FX series 'Impeachment,' about her relationship with former President Bill Clinton when she was a 22-year-old intern and the fallout from it. Lewinsky knows 'deep in her bones what it feels like to have a bad experience, the worst experience of her life, used to diminish her and the turning of her into a punchline,' Knox said. 'She has been such a trailblazer in the mission of refusing to be squashed, refusing to be limited.' 'I was really moved by how open people were to me,' Knox said of her collaborators. 'I felt supported not just as a source but as a storyteller in my own right.' Knox said coverage of her was informed and shaped by persistent cultural messaging that 'women are either sluts or virgins, and that they all secretly hate each other and would murder each other if they had the chance,' she said. She believes younger generations are more likely to scrutinize reporting and demand more nuance than the public did during her trial. Still, Knox said she was initially reluctant to saddle Van Patten, 28, with 'this baggage that I have been carrying around my entire adult life.' 'In the same way that I didn't want the dark shadow of being the girl accused of murder passed on to my daughter,' Knox said, 'I didn't want that to pass on to Grace.' Van Patten had few preconceived ideas about Knox's story. She was a child when it happened and first learned about the case in the 2016 documentary 'Amanda Knox,' which included interviews with Knox, Sollecito and Mignini, among others. 'The show gives everyone the opportunity to understand it more and to form an opinion based on facts, and not what they were being fed at the time,' Van Patten said. 'She was just a 20-year-old girl going through this.'

Bowser calls Trump's takeover of D.C. police department ‘unsettling and unprecedented'
Bowser calls Trump's takeover of D.C. police department ‘unsettling and unprecedented'

Washington Post

time15 minutes ago

  • Washington Post

Bowser calls Trump's takeover of D.C. police department ‘unsettling and unprecedented'

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on Monday called President Donald Trump's federal takeover of the D.C. police department 'unsettling and unprecedented" and said that the city's police chief remains in charge of the District's police force. Bowser said city officials would 'continue to operate our government in a way that makes you proud.' Earlier, Trump announced the takeover as well as plans to deploy the D.C. National Guard to fight crime, saying the nation's capital was suffering from 'crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.' D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D) called the takeover of the police department 'unlawful' and said the city is exploring options to respond. The redistricting standoff in Texas is stretching into its second week with increased threats between red and blue states, and fresh doubts about what will end an impasse that will shape which party controls Congress after next year's midterm elections. The fight goes far beyond Texas. President Donald Trump is pushing several other Republican-led states to draw new congressional maps to help protect Republicans' narrow House majority, which stands at 219-212 with four vacancies. The Trump administration is significantly escalating U.S. government criticism of perceived foes in South Africa and Brazil as the State Department's political leadership reimagines America's role in documenting human rights abuses around the world, according to leaked draft documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

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