Latest news with #Tafoya
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Yahoo
Family looking for answers in hit-and-run that killed man celebrating his birthday
DENVER (KDVR) — A family is searching for answers after one of their own was the victim of a hit-and-run on Sunday, May 18, near Interstate 25 and 23rd Avenue. FOX31's Jared Dean spoke with the family of Christopher Tafoya on Sunday about their grief and loss. Tafoya's uncle, Himon Robles, said that he was close to Tafoya and was heartbroken to hear the news of the crash. He said that Tafoya was out celebrating his 27th birthday the night he was hit. 4 taken to hospital after crash on Parker Road near Broncos Parkway 'A nightmare, a nightmare that you wish you could wake up from; a nightmare, you wish would end, but it hasn't,' Robles said. 'It's just very hard to have somebody you have known their whole life to be gone instantly.' Police still don't have any suspects in the crash, but they issued a Crime Stoppers bulletin on Thursday. Still, his family is making funeral arrangements and is left looking for answers. 'We're trying to come together and piece together what happened to him and hopefully there's somebody who seen something that will say something,' Robles said. 'He was out celebrating his birthday and never came back home. You never would've expected that and now we're just trying to find answers to the person who hit him and left him on the side of the road when they have the opportunity to stop, but they decided to go and leave.' Robles told Dean that Tafoya loved his friends, family and god, and said that Dean would have given someone the shirt off his back if needed. 'It's so cliché to say, but it truly is, he's that type of person, he would do anything for you,' Robles said. Robles and other members of Tafoya's family are still holding out hope that someone will come forward and give the family some closure. Governor vetoes rideshare safety bill: Sponsors call action a 'devastating blow' 'This person — his light has been dimmed, but will let it shine on forever once we get justice for him,' Robles said. Anyone with information is asked to contact Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867 or online at Tipsters can remain anonymous and qualify for an up to $2,000 reward. The family also has a GoFundMe established to help cover funeral expenses, which is available here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
South China Morning Post
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Dope Thief author on why Apple TV+'s adaptation had to be shot in ‘magnetic' Philadelphia
Author Dennis Tafoya remembers his time working in accident and emergency in a hospital in Doylestown, Philadelphia, in the 1980s. Advertisement One night, a call came in about a fire at a farmhouse-turned-meth lab, but when doctors attempted to help, the burn victim refused care and eventually died. 'It got me thinking about who ends up in a burning meth lab in the middle of the night,' said Tafoya in a recent call with Philadelphia newspaper The Inquirer. That incident was the seed of the idea that, decades later, became Tafoya's 2009 novel Dope Thief. It has since been adapted into a series of the same name on Apple TV+, written, directed, and executive produced by Peter Craig – who co-wrote the screenplay for 2010 crime thriller The Town – and executive produced by legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott Scott also directed the pilot, which introduces the two best friends-protagonists, Ray ( Brian Tyree Henry ) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who pose as DEA drug enforcement agents to steal money from small-time drug dealers.
The Australian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Australian
Ridley Scott's new Philadelphia crime caper is a cracker of a show
We don't normally think of Philadelphia, nicknamed the City of Brotherly Love, when it comes to crime fiction. But it's also known as a place that's 'quick to anger, prickly and prideful, wary of the new', according to writer Chris Satullo. It's the perfect backdrop for Dope Thief, Apple TV's new, hilarious at times, and rather disturbing at others, crime caper that follows a couple of street hoods stealing drugs from selected dealers, 'low-level tweakers', while posing as DEA agents. 'They don't remember your face, just your badge,' is their modus operandi. Their dangerous scheme eventually lands the pair in the crosshairs of an implacable, powerful operation connected to the hidden narcotics corridor on the eastern seaboard, determined to hunt them down and exact revenge. They are also pursued, a little ironically, by the real DEA, just as deadly as the facially tattooed sicarios sent looking for retribution. Dope Thief is a cracker of a show, possessing a pulpy vitality, superb acting and diverting action sequences, and it is as astutely engineered as any series we've seen this year. It's also about what it's like to be family, and how the loneliness of men can sometimes result in tender relationships, while all around is grim mayhem. And about how these men struggle for some sort of better life, even though they know the odds are stacked against them, their futures bleakly predictable, even as they seek atonement. Originally titled Sinking Spring, the series is from Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions; the famed director is also executive producer and director of the first episode establishing the show's distinctive, visceral aesthetic, which is tight, trim and tense. The show, years in the making, was created by Peter Craig, not only a successful crime author but a seasoned screenwriter known for films such as The Batman, The Town, and Top Gun Maverick. It's based on the novel of the same title by Dennis Tafoya, author of two other highly acclaimed books, The Wolves of Fairmount Park and The Poor Boy's Game. Tafoya's inspiration for Dope Thief, according to online magazine Bucks Happening, apparently came from an alarming real-life event in remote Plumsteadville, a small Pennsylvania township where a meth lab fire led to the discovery of a body in the woods. At the time, Tafoya was working as a medical technician in nearby Bucks County, and the incident stayed with him for years. This haunting image set the foundation for a heist novel that explores the dark underbelly of malfeasance and consequence. Respected crime magazine Kirkus Reviews called it: 'An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a reader's heart is often as not through flawed characters.' Ridley Scott at the TCL Chinese Theatre in August 2024 in Los Angeles. Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic. Picture: Getty Images. The two leading characters in Craig's series are certainly that. Brian Tyree Henry is cocky Ray Driscoll, full of hustler bombast and the gift of the gab, a born wheeler-dealer who believes he's cleaning the streets by his robberies. But his life is complicated by Teresa, a brilliant Kate Mulgrew, longtime girlfriend of his incarcerated father, Bart, an equally impressive Ving Rhames, who raised him as her son and to whom he is emotionally indebted, even if she's addicted to her lottery tickets. Wagner Moura is vulnerable and emotional as his best friend, Manny Carvalho, who desperately wants the violent situation he finds himself in to disappear. Who wouldn't? Sherry (Liz Caribel Sierra), his faithful girlfriend, doesn't know about his illegal vocation and has little time for the hustling Ray. Henry and Moura are heartbreakingly convincing in these roles. Their rattled-off dialogues together are like pieces of street opera, abrasively shrill but weirdly full of affection. Craig says he has little problem with being hemmed in a little to the crime genre, especially after the success of The Town, the successful thriller directed by Ben Affleck. 'I got very comfortable in it really quickly,' he told The Hollywood Reporter. 'I started as a novelist who wrote books that were only moderately read, but they were respected crime books that were mostly about conmen. I just loved the genre because the stakes are immediately there, and you can do what you want to do with character.' Craig has worked mainly in feature films and Dope Thief is his first TV venture. He says he studied Mad Men scripts to learn how it was done, the celebrated series teaching him about the way to create layered characters. 'It's great TV when there can always be another layer to somebody no matter how much you scratch him,' he said in another interview with the Creative Screenwriting website. The trick in all the great crime shows, he found, is the way the main character starts as a 'regular person and you put them in a terrible situation, and you watch them adapt to it', he says citing The Godfather and Breaking Bad. He was also after the feel of '70s crime movies such as Chinatown and Dog Day Afternoon, the quirky humour and the way that, in those movies, it comes from unexpected places in the writing. And to add to the pile of influences, there was Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway and Straw Dogs. 'I watched those over and over, and try to capture some of that feeling. Sam was gritty, he was ugly. He let things get really uncomfortable and you felt like if somebody's arm got scraped, you felt that scrape on your own arm.' Creator Peter Craig was after the feel of series is such as Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston as Walter White, above. Craig was working with Scott on a film project and showed him the pilot script for Dope Thief he had been writing at the same time. Scott liked Craig's sense of dark humour and wanted to do TV again. 'TV is a massive basket full of balls,' he said recently. 'Every now and again something comes up like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, and that influences everybody, who then rushes to that ball to copy it and it's already too late. That's how I function as a director – what's the next ball?' Dope Thief was his. His movies, so often grandiose, high-concept and philosophical, have always been intensely cinematic, taking audiences to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. Oscar-winning Hollywood director Sydney Pollack called him one of cinema's great stylists, along with Adrian Lyne and Alan Parker: 'Every shot has a great idea in it.' While the series has been heavily promoted as if Scott is a stranger to TV, across the 30 years of its existence Scott Free has received more than 100 Emmy nominations with 22 wins, and 28 Golden Globe nominations for its TV projects. But this project is new territory for Ridley Scott. His last, Raised By Wolves, a high-concept sci-fi series, was not the success he had hoped for, but he was ready to do television again. 'So once Ridley jumped on, it suddenly looked like we had a show, and I just went at it,' Craig said. 'I just went towards the daylight, like a plant that grows towards the daylight. And I was lucky enough that I had committed early on to something that I understood really well. So it was partly the opportunity, and it was partly the love at first sight of Ray and Manny.' As you might expect of Scott, he cleverly establishes the world of this drama and its characters while introducing the series' long-running themes and visual language. Craig says he treats it all like theatre, often using several cameras so he only needs a couple of takes. There were often four crowded in on his two leading actors somehow still brilliantly lit by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, a regular on David Fincher projects and who also worked on Raised By Wolves. Martin Freeman as Lester Nygaard in the TV series, Fargo.... 'eternal dusk'. They were after what Scott called a disorienting feeling of 'eternal dusk' through the series, using the Coen brothers' Fargo as another influence. The series presents the decaying sections of Pennsylvania with the lonely, echoing streets, the sunlight always muted and washed out, and the rain always threatening. The first episode is a masterclass in direction when Ray and Manny's lives are ignominiously altered when they take on a new hand, hiring Rick (Spenser Granese) when Ray targets a remote farm that's the base for a clan lab, a clandestine laboratory, manufacturing narcotics. But the new guy panics and the ensuing shootout leaves him dead. Ray has a bullet in his shoulder, and he and Manny are on the run, with a voice on a stolen radio taunting them about killing them, and their families. Dope Thief might struggle a bit after Scott sets the pace – like so many shows these days it's a little too attenuated – but whatever, it's a blast. Dope Thief,streaming on Apple TV+. Graeme Blundell TV Writer Actor, director, producer and writer, Graeme Blundell has been associated with many pivotal moments in Australian theatre, film and television. He has directed over 100 plays, acted in about the same number, and appeared in more than 40 films and hundreds of hours of television. He is also a prolific reporter, and is the national television critic for The Australian. Graeme presents movies on Foxtel's Fox Classics, and presents film review show Screen on Foxtel's arts channel with Margaret Pomeranz.
Fox News
21-04-2025
- Sport
- Fox News
GUY BENSON SHOW: Michele Tafoya Joins the Show, Discusses the Masters and the 'Stupid' Resistance to Protecting Women's Sports
Former longtime NFL sideline reporter and host of The Michele Tafoya Podcast , Michele Tafoya, joined The Guy Benson Show today to share her thoughts on this year's unforgettable finish at the Masters, where Rory McIlroy finally claimed his long-awaited green jacket. She reflected on her favorite part of attending the tournament in person, and then Benson and Tafoya pivoted to applauding a recent UK ruling that legally defines 'woman' and calling it a crucial step forward for protecting women's rights. Tafoya also weighed in on the U.S. government's lawsuit against the state of Maine, which aims to safeguard women's sports from unfair competition by trans athletes. Listen to the full interview below. Listen to the full interview below: Listen to the full podcast below:
Fox News
04-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Ex-NFL reporter Michele Tafoya theorizes why bill to keep men out of women's sports failed in Senate
Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya theorized Tuesday why Senate Democrats failed to break a filibuster and express support for keeping biological males out of women's and girls sports. No Senate Democrat voted in favor of the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act to break a filibuster. Republicans needed 60 votes but only received 51. On the same day, in Minnesota, House lawmakers there voted against the Preserving Girls' Sports Act. Each Democratic lawmaker in the state voted against the legislation. Tafoya gave her thoughts on the political pushback in an interview on OutKick's "Don't @ Me with Dan Dakich." "Part of me is starting to think they didn't want to give the president a 'W' the day before he is going to address Congress tonight, that joint session of Congress," Tafoya told Dakich. "And so they all just — and, seriously, politicians collude — and they all got together and said, 'We can't do this. We can't give him this win, so let's just vote no.' And they stick together, man. They stick together." Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Liish Kozlowski likened the Preserving Girls' Sports Act to "state-sanctioned bullying and genocide" during a debate about the legislation Monday, according to OutKick. It's the same type of language Hannah Edwards, executive director of Transforming Families, used in a news release from Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke in January after Trump signed an executive order targeting federal funding of transgender healthcare. "It's ridiculous, and I'm trying to get my head around, like do people really buy into this, that this is some sort of trans genocide because boys shouldn't play in girls sports?" Tafoya said. "It makes no sense. We have some pretty radical Democrats here in Minnesota, I mean, like really radical. And so that's what we're dealing with. "I don't know how that language is received by the average person. If I'm considered the average person, I think that person's a lunatic suggesting that. I don't know how these people keep getting elected." Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
