The Crash: The Mackenzie Shirilla Case (Going Beyond The Netflix Doc)

Written By Kaelyn Moore

In July 2022, 18-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove her car into a brick wall at nearly 100 miles per hour, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his best friend Davion Flanagan. What looked like a drug-fueled accident unraveled fast, and the Netflix documentary only tells part of the story. This week, we go deeper: the details left on the cutting room floor, the recorded prison call that changed everything, and the question that still doesn't have a straight answer.

TW: Mentions of suicide

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TRANSCRIPT



In 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla was behind the wheel of a car crash that left two people dead. While at first it looked like a tragic accident, the investigation soon discovered that the crash was likely intentional


This case is the subject of a new netflix documentary that everyone is talking about, but did you know that there is more the doc left out? We’re diving into all of that today, so make sure you stick around and SUBSCRIBE so you can meet me here in the rds headquarters each week.


It was summer of 2022 in Strongsville, Ohio. The morning of July 31st. A normally quiet part of town, nobody was up and about yet. The sky was slowly turning the deep blue of pre-dawn when someone noticed something strange near the intersection of Progress Drive and Alameda. A ground sign by the road had been completely destroyed. Past it, near the brick wall of a manufacturing facility, lay a 2018 Toyota Camry that looked like it had, to put it lightly, exploded. 


The brick wall infront of the camry was damaged, the car had clearly careened off the road and smashed into it. 


The car was in terrible shape — the entire front was badly mangled, the windshield was folded in on itself, the body was completely crumpled.


The first person on the scene was Michael Galassi, a patrol officer with Strongsville PD. To his eyes, the car looked almost as if it had been cut in half. Beneath the crumpled hood, the nose of the car was a nearly unrecognizable tangle of metal and debris from the brick wall. All airbags had been deployed, almost completely obscuring the windows. Galassi ran to the drivers’ side to check for survivors. Through the broken glass, he saw what he thought were the legs and lower torso of a young woman. Her head was under the dash board, and she was strapped into her seatbelt


Through the passenger side window, he saw that the seat was fully reclined. There was a body sprawled across it, facing upward. It was a young man with severe head trauma. He didn’t seem to be breathing. Beneath him was a third body.


The Strongsville Fire Department arrived shortly after. Using hydraulic equipment, they freed all three occupants from the car. Officer Galassi had assumed that all of the people inside were dead, the crash just didn’t look like something anyone could have survived, but that wasn’t the case. One of the young men, 20 year old Dominic Russo, was dead, the other, high school senior Davion Flanagan,  showed faint vital signs. Neither of the boys were wearing seatbelts. 


The driver was also alive, having sustained severe injuries to her legs and arms. That was 18 year old Mackenzie Shirilla. 


Barely conscious, she spoke to the EMTs, asking, “how is Davion?”


’Davion’, was lying on top of Dom in the passenger seat. The accident appeared to have launched him from the backseat to the front


A pair of air ambulances were called to take the two survivors to the hospital. Mackenzie was airlifted safely, and taken straight to Metro Health Medical Center.


The other survivor, Davion, tragically passed away while waiting for the helicopters to arrive.


Once all three victims were removed from the Camry, police and other first responders went over the wreck for evidence as to what could have possibly caused this incredibly violent crash. Inside, Galassi found around 8 grams of mushrooms, a digital scale, and a bag of marijuana inside Mackenzie’s purse. 


They took extensive photos of the wreck, documenting the scene of this tragic accident. Because that’s what it was, they figured? An accident. A senseless tragedy caused by a driver who was under the influence of drugs or alcohol…


… but something contained within the wreck carried a different story. Something that would turn this from a senseless accident… into a murder.


On August 2nd, 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla turned 18 in a hospital bed. She’d been very badly banged up when they brought her in the morning of July 31st. Everyone who talks about this case says it was basically a miracle that she survived. 


She had a broken femur, three broken ribs, both her kidney and liver were lacerated, one of her arms was broken. Both her carotid arteries had been damaged when her neck snapped forward in the crash.


In her car the night of the crash were Dominic Russo, her 20-year-old boyfriend, and Davion Flanagan, a classmate of Mackenzie’s and good friend of Dominic’s. Davion had walked the stage at graduation with her that May. The shock of losing these two was rippling through the community already. Classmates, family and friends shared memorials to Dominic and Davion on their obituary pages – many of which you can still see to this day.


Outpourings of love and support flooded her as she recovered in Metro Health Medical Center. 


Mackenzie, Like many people her age, was very active on social media, particularly TikTok, instagram and Snapchat, though in my research, I found she had a Facebook account as well. Though her social media accounts have now all gone dark, recordings of her posts are all over the internet. It’s kind of overwhelming. Through her instagram, @kenzieshirilla, she posted alongside her friend Rosie Graham, another aspiring model.


Davion was A star football player, he recently had to rethink his career path after he tore his ACL. According to his adopted parents, he wanted to go to barber school and open his own shop.


By contrast, his friend Dominic didn’t have as specific of a path he wanted to go down. 20 years old, he’d graduated a couple years earlier, and was still trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’d started a clothing line, dabbled in producing music and investing in cryptocurrency. According to his siblings, he was an endlessly curious young man. 


Dominic and Mackenzie had been together for 4 years. They’d met when he was an upperclassman and she was a Freshman. They moved in together in December the previous year, into a house owned by Dominic’s mother Christine.  He pampered Mackenzie with gifts of clothes and accessories. To quote Mackenzie’s parents, he “wasn’t hurting for money”.


The two of them were part of an inseparable group of five friends — Mackenzie, Dominic, Davion, Rosie, and Bubba, one of Davion’s football teammates. They hung out almost every day, including the day of the accident.


Ambience- mysterious / investigative 


The night of July 30th began with a graduation party at the house of one of Kenzie’s friends, Kellie Vraja. Kellie and Mackenzie had been friends since 2020. It was a pretty lowkey event, in her words. A handful of friends hanging around a fire pit, smoking weed. Mackenzie, Dominic and Davion arrived at around 10:30 PM with a bottle of tequila and some weed.


Now, Mackenzie was known to smoke a lot of weed. She heavily documented herself on social media smoking blunts and bongs, often while driving. In the netflix doc, her parents admitted that they never had a problem with this. 


While hanging out, Mackenzie asked Kellie if she was into magic mushrooms. Kellie said she wasn’t, and the evening went on. According to Kellie, it sounded like Dominic and Mackenzie were debating between spending that night tripping or going to another friend’s place. Around a half hour later, the three decided on the latter, and left Kellie’s party.


At 11 PM, Mackenzie, Dominic and Davion arrived at the home of Paul Burlinghaus. He’d been friends with Mackenzie since middle school. It was another lowkey hang, with everyone getting high, watching YouTube videos and listening to music.


Paul went to sleep at midnight, so he didn’t see Mackenzie leave. According to her other friends, Mackenzie slept briefly at 3AM, before waking up at 5am to go back home. Someone else offered to give Davion a ride home, but Davion chose to go with Mackenzie and Dominic instead.


This is a tragically common story, kids out drinking and doing drugs, and then getting in a car wreck. And maybe the police thought it would be just like the ones they had seen before. But it very quickly became evident that was not going to be the case. 


When Mackenzie went in for surgery, doctors ran a blood test on her. And it revealed, contrary to what people might have been expecting, that she had not been drunk that night. A drug test order was canceled and not taken until a few days later, but that revealed she didn’t have mushrooms in her system either. The only thing in her blood was THC from marijuana.


Now, there is some debate online about the mushrooms. Because the test was taken days after, there might not have been anything left in her system. But the police thought the best thing to do would be to ask Mackenzie what exactly happened that night


The only thing was, though, she didn’t remember. According to Mackenzie, she remembered being in the car driving home, and then waking up in the hospital. Nothing about the crash, swerving, not feeling well, nothing. 


This was going to be a much more complicated investigation than they had anticipated. And it was going to come down to other people and what they could find about Mackenzie online to help fill in the gaps.


Not long after the crash, Tyler Croy, one of Davion’s friends visited Strongsville PD with a tip for investigating detective Zaki Hazou. 


Croy showed the police an app on his phone called Life360. It’s a location monitoring app that shares cell phone tracking between friends and family. Croy had been out of town during the crash, but when he heard that Davion was involved, he checked Davion’s tracking data from the morning of the 31st. According to the app, Davion had been traveling at 90 miles per hour right before the crash, not slowing down at all before they hit the brick building.


Now, this app wasn’t proof of anything, but it might indicate some kind of technical glitch in the 2018 Toyota Camry.


Well, this is where things get really suspicious.


The Camry had an Event Data Recorder, essentially a black box. Now, it had been salvaged by the vehicle forensics team, and sent to a specialist in Brooklyn to interpret the data.


According to the expert, the EDR only stored the final 4.75 seconds before the crash, but the data seemed to back up what Life360 had shown. The car’s accelerator was pressed all the way down for at least 4.6 of those seconds, and the brake wasn’t applied. Their final speed was between 80 and 100 miles per hour.


They were able to reconstruct enough to know that the car  hit the curb, briefly went airborne, and then about a second before impact, there was a hard yank on the steering wheel — 142 degrees. and also, that the car had been “shifted back and forth between drive, sequential and neutral in the 4.7 seconds before the crash”


Was this the sign of a driver trying to regain control of the car? Or perhaps a passenger trying to wrest control from a dangerous driver?


But investigators were now sure of one thing, nothing had gone wrong with the car to cause this. The driver, Mackenzie, had pressed her foot all the way down, until the car was accelerating to  nearly 100mph, and not hit the brake once. For almost 25 seconds. 


And this whole investigation was about to get stranger. Detective Hazou managed to get ahold of nearby CCTV cameras that showed the street leading up to the crash site. A video feed from a nearby intersection showed Mackenzie’s Camry traveling at a reasonable 35 miles per hour, signaling, and then turning onto Progress drive. Nothing about this part of the video seems like reckless driving


At some point in the half-mile gap, Mackenzie’s car had accelerated from 35 to 100 miles per hour.


Because A camera a half-mile down the road showed the car flying by at a breakneck speed. A third video showed the car leaving the road fully, and crashing just out of frame.


It was at this point that Strongsville PD realized  they had to treat this as a potential homicide. Detective Hazou visited Mackenzie in the hospital to tell her and her mother. He told her that the police needed to take her phone for a little while.


Mackenzie was clearly alarmed. According to Detective Hazou, the first thing she said in response was, “Can’t you just take my license away for 10 years or something?”


That was not mentioned in the doc, but I could not believe that that was her response. Two people were dead and she asked if her license could just be taken for a bit as punishment?


And it was once the investigators go ahold of her phone, that the image of who mackenzie was REALLY started becoming more clear.


Ambience- investigative 


Before her phone was taken away by the investigators, Mackenzie Shirilla was deeply invested in making amends for what happened.


She texted Dominic’s mother, Christine Russo, trying her best to explain. She wrote, “I don’t remember the accident. All I remember is turning on the street and then my vision fading into black I wish I could remember it would make me feel a little bit better.”


On August 6th, she texted Dominic’s brother Angelo. Her message read, “Would you be able to go in Dom’s room and grab some photos from his desk of me and him so I could put them into the casket so he can be with me forever.”


She later sent a follow-up text to Angelo, which read: “I know you probably think that this is all my fault… I wish that he was here too. This should have never happened (...) I really do feel bad. It’s killing me.”


Mackenzie’s parents, Natalie and Steven, were by her side from day one. They’d been through a rough patch recently — the couple had declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy that May, the same month Mackenzie graduated. Stephanie Jessup, Mackenzie’s aunt, started a GoFundMe page to support Mackenzie’s recovery. The family was braced for a long and painful rehab.


Ambience- mysterious 


During this time, Mackenzie received a visit from Jamie Flanagan, Davion’s adopted mother. Jamie encountered Natalie Shirilla in the hospital room, looking after her daughter. The first thing that Natalie said to her, rather than I’m sorry for your loss, was… “Don’t believe what they’re saying on Facebook.”


Jamie found this extremely odd. What did Natalie mean?


People online, it seemed, were already turning against Mackenzie. They were saying that there was something suspicious about the crash, blaming Mackenzie for what happened. Now, we all know that social media loves a scapegoat, and people in pain often look for someone to blame… but in this case, the internet mob might have been onto something.


Ambience- investigative 


On TikTok, Kenzi and Dom posted like a ride-or-die power couple, going out together, smoking and partying together. Dancing in the club, going to the county fair, taking a party bus to prom, that kind of thing. In reality, the relationship was a volatile one.


Dominic’s mother Christine Russo said the relationship between Dominic and Mackenzie soured starting in January of 2022, but according to their peers, tension was just a regular part of their relationship.


According to his father, Dominic and Mackenzie had a relationship of high highs and really low lows. They’d have huge fights, break up, and then get back together on a regular basis. The four years they spent together included several periods where they were fully broken up after huge fights.


Friends would mention that Mackenzie stopped trusting Dominic after he cheated on her, and regularly threatened to break up with him. Dominic’s friends said that he could do much better, saying that she was a problem. But no matter what side they were on, everyone agreed that the couple’s arguments were dramatic and sometimes dangerous.


When she didn’t get her way, Mackenzie could be pretty intense.


One of her fights with her parents was so bad that it was the subject of a police report. On March 23, 2020, Strongsville police were called to the Shirilla household because Mackenzie — then 15 years old — was threatening to take her own life. The police report said that she was not going to be taken to a hospital for treatment, because her parents didn’t believe the threats were real. 


In the Netflix documentary, Natalie and Steven Shirilla said that they thought Mackenzie was mature enough that she could be trusted to move in with her 20 year old boyfriend. Even after fights that were so bad the police were involved. Even though Mackenzie was just a teenager. It just really seems like they had an incredibly hard time telling their daughter no. Even for basic, common sense things


Mackenzie lived with Dominic for over 7 months, and according to Dominic’s family, she was accepted like a member of their family. But, as anyone with in-laws could tell you, ‘accepted’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘liked’. Dominic’s friends didn’t seem to trust Mackenzie, and neither did his siblings.


On July 17th, 2022, Christopher Martin, a friend of the Russos, was with Christine when she received a call from her son. Dominic was on the highway with Mackenzie, and he said that he didn’t feel safe. He sounded extremely distressed. Christine sent Martin to get her son.


Martin got on the road and called Dominic to get the location from him. He eventually found Mackenzie’s car pulling over to the shoulder of Interstate 71. 


Neither the Russo family nor Christopher Martin reported this incident to the police. But it did ultimately end up in the police report on this case. And here’s what the report said on this


“Martin was on the phone with Dominic at the time. As both cars were pulling over, Martin heard Dominic and Shirilla arguing. During the course of the argument, Shirilla said, “I’m going to wreck this car right now.” Dominic moved to exit the vehicle when it came to a stop. Martin testified that he saw a “tussle” inside the car, with Shirilla “swinging her hands at him.”


And the more stories police heard about the couple, the worse things looked. 


One night, Mackenzie showed up at Dominic’s house. She was angry, and demanding to be let in. Dominic told her firmly that she broke up with him and they no longer live together. He told her to calm down, but she did not. She threatened to stay there all night, and said that she’d key his car if he didn’t let her in.


Dominic recorded this episode on his cell phone, and it’s a harrowing one to listen to, they play a little bit of it in the doc. It’s hard to completely make sense of it even with all the context, but what it shows us is a vivid portrait of what their fights looked like. Almost more like hostage negotiations than any breakup fight I’ve ever witnessed.


And that’s one thing that i feel like gets a little lost in this story. The documentary really spends a long time painting a picture of Mackenzie, but my heart broke for Dom here. I know, we’re only seeing one side of everything, but It must have been so scary to be in a volatile relationship like this in high school. And to spend the last few years of his life being threatened by his girlfriend. 


By the time the end of July rolled around, it’s hard to say definitively where this relationship was at. They might have been on the verge of another cataclysmic breakup, they might have been in the process of patching things up. Their friends seem divided on this point — Angelo thinks that Dom wanted to end things for good, Rosie and Mackenzie’s other friends said that the two of them were considering marriage. This was just spoken about in the netflix doc though, because Rosie refused to talk to police after the crash. 


But this leads us to the night of July 30th. Where all we have to go on are the surveillance videos of the car: Passing the light at 35 miles per hour, then suddenly screaming up to 100 and crashing into the wall.


By the fall of 2022, Mackenzie was well enough to regularly leave the hospital. In October, she was photographed at a concert sitting in a wheelchair. Later that month, she was spotted on social media, attending a Halloween party with Rosie and other friends. She no longer needed the wheelchair. They were all dressed as the rapper Playboi Carti, a look that I’d describe as kinda zombie clown-like. The parents of the victims, not understanding the reference, were offended that she’d dress like a corpse so soon after killing her friends.


Even if you think the group costume was innocent in intent, the posts are tasteless in context. If you didn’t know better, it’s possible to believe that this 18 year old had never been in a car accident. It’s like all her TikTok clips – poppy and flirty. Cool stoner girl is back, as if she’d never left.


And then, On November 2, while her mother was driving her back from physical therapy, Mackenzie was arrested.


At 2:23 PM, Detective Hazou charged her with the murders of Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. Her bond was set at $500,000. 


Seemingly in shock, all she could do was ask the arresting officer to not break her friendship bracelets when putting the handcuffs on.


Mackenzie Shirilla was facing charges of murder, felonious assault, aggravated vehicular homicide, drug possession, and possession of criminal tools. At the time of the crash, she’d been 17 years old, which would mean she’d be tried in juvenile court. A conviction as a juvenile meant she’d be facing probation, which for the state and the parents of the victims, was far too lenient.


The state prosecutors, Tim Troup and Allison McGrath, argued that probable cause existed to try her in Cuyahoga County criminal court. A grand jury reviewed the evidence. Though they found that probable cause did not exist for the murder charges, they did exist for the rest of the charges, including vehicular homicide and drug possession. Mackenzie was now going to be given a full criminal trial.


Rather than probation, she could get multiple life sentences for the deaths of Dominic and Davion.


The Shirilla family hired a respected local attorney, James McDonnell, to represent her. At a pre-trial hearing on April 13th, Mackenzie pleaded not guilty. She waived the right to a jury trial, requesting what’s called a ‘bench trial’ before a judge, who would decide the verdict and sentencing.


I get maybe why she did this. Mackenzie and her mother clearly felt that the world was starting to turn against her based on her social media activity. While she did — and still does — have supporters online, many people across platforms were pointing out a seeming lack of remorse in Mackenzie’s post-crash behavior.


While researching this case, I even found a Reddit thread written by someone who claimed Mackenzie was their bully in high school. people had their knives out. Mackenzie probably felt she was safer turning the decision over to an impartial judge, rather than a jury that could be biased by what they read online.


In an ironic twist of fate, the judge in the case was Nancy M. Russo. No relation to Dominic.


On August 7th, 2023, The State of Ohio v. Mackenzie Shirilla officially began. The state prosecutors intended to prove that Mackenzie Shirilla intended to kill Dominic Russo in July of 2022, and that Davion Flanagan was collateral damage in this attempt. 


They brought up how, according to the investigators, Mackenzie’s phone seemed to indicate that she had been on the same road where she crashed on July 28th — two days before the incident.


Cell phone location data can be fuzzy and sometimes imprecise, Without the precise addresses involved, it’s hard to say for certain, but everyone seems to agree that Progress was not her usual way home. Is it possible that the crash was premeditated?


The defense made the case that this was reckless and irresponsible behavior, but that does not constitute willful intent to murder. She blacked out during the event, and could remember none of it, thanks to a combination of trauma and a medical condition she’d suffered for a number of years.


Mackenzie appeared in court with her right arm in a sling, which critics interpreted as a ploy for sympathy from the judge. 


This trial is an interesting one, because neither side had any way of proving what happened in the car before the crash. So the evidence introduced by the prosecution was mostly to do with Mackenzie’s character and her relationship with Dominic Russo. Friends of Mackenzie, Russo and Flanagan were brought in as witnesses, as were their parents.


On day 2 of the trial, both Dominic’s mother and older brother took the stand. Christine Russo confirmed that Dominic and Mackenzie had a turbulent relationship, characterized by regular breakups. She described Mackenzie as “possessive” and said that she’d witnessed many fights between the two. Angelo Russo agreed with her characterization of the relationship, saying quote, “I witnessed a lot of negative behavior from her to my brother and that just kind of pushed me away as a big brother figure because she just wasn't fair to him.”


He said Dominic had intended to break up with Mackenzie that summer for good.


They played the phone video of Dominic and Mackenzie arguing outside of Dominic’s home, where she is heard threatening to key his car. The defense emphasized that the fight was a mutual one, between two passionate young people.


McDonnell introduced a text message into evidence, from Mackenzie to Christine Russo. It read, "It really kills me not being able to remember anything. I promise you I would tell you. I've been asking my therapist why I don't remember and she said it's because of trauma but I'm gonna try to go get hypnotized and make myself remember."


The text, he said, indicated genuine grief and a desire to stay close to the Russos, who she thought of as family. And ever since the text message from Mackenzie to Christine, Mackenzie had maintained that she could not remember what happened.


On day four, Mackenzie’s team made a last minute decision to bring Natalie Shirilla, Mackenzie’s mother, to the stand. 


Now, Natalie and Mackenzie’s relationship had always been….strange. One thing the documentary doesn’t touch on is that the two of them spoke to each other in gibberish similar to pig latin. Some people have suggested its Carny, literally the language that carnies at fairs would use to talk to each other


Natalie stated under oath that her daughter had been diagnosed with a condition known as POTS – postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It’s a condition that can cause low blood pressure and increased heart rate. She said Mackenzie had been diagnosed in 2017 and had been taking salt tablets to help manage it.


She claimed that Mackenzie had been fine for a while, hadn’t shown any signs of passing out, but two weeks before the crash, her symptoms had begun to reappear. 


When I read this, I couldn’t help but think: If this is true, why was she allowed to have a drivers’ license at all? The prosecution asked this very thing, and Natalie’s response is… a little baffling.


Natalie admitted to not disclosing the condition when Mackenzie applied for her drivers’ license.


Let’s just think about this together, because I’m kind of stuck on this. If Mackenzie had passed out, that meant for 25 seconds, two boys much bigger than her were not able to get her foot off of the gas pedal. And the judge agrees with me on the fact that the gears shifting from neutral back to drive meant that someone in the car, most likely the driver, was conscious enough to move the shifter. 


This admission did not win Natalie much grace. She’d already gotten a lot of criticism for seemingly lax parenting. Her daughter regularly posted thirst traps and videos of herself getting stoned, and Natalie seemingly just followed her and liked the posts in support. 


And not to mention,during a recorded phone call between Mackenzie and Natalie while Mackenzie was in prison, one of the investigators alleged that their gibberish translated to something like, can’t we just tell them I had a seizure or something. To which Natalie responded, “we can” 


As an outsider, I can’t say for certain what Mackenzie’s relationship was like with her parents, but as a parent, the idea that Natalie would hide medical details to make it easier to get her daughter a car… I struggle to sympathize. 


Another piece of evidence that came to light during the trial was an interaction on Mackenzie’s instagram that August, where a modeling agency from LA commented on one of her pictures, offering to collaborate. Natalie had responded to this on her daughter’s behalf, thanking them for the opportunity. 


On the stand, she said this was because Mackenzie’s phone was in police custody, but again, not a great look. It makes her seem like an opportunistic manager rather than a mother who wanted to protect her recently injured daughter.


Natalie also denied that her daughter had ever expressed suicidal feelings to her, but this claim was struck immediately, since the March 2020 incident was already on the record. Which suggests that she was lying under oath.


As part of their closing arguments, the prosecution introduced a pair of TikToks from Mackenzie’s account. One of them showed her smirking as an audio clip plays, saying: “I’m not even cool, I’m just one of those girls who can do lots of drugs and not die”.


The other was a video clip cut to the song Bubblegum Bitch by MARINA. The lyrics playing over the video are: “I've got a figure like a pin-up / Got a figure like a doll / Don't care if you think I'm dumb / I don't care at all / Candy bear, sweetie pie / Wanna be adored… / I'm the girl you'd die for.”


Tim Troup also introduced the images of her attending the concert and Halloween party, indicating Mackenzie’s “shocking lack of remorse” for what had happened.


The question seemed to boil down into a judgment over Mackenzie herself:


Did she crash intentionally?


Or did she black out?


Is this someone who had a plan to kill her boyfriend, or someone who didn’t know what she was doing?


On Friday, August 14th, Judge Russo gave her verdict. Mackenzie Shirilla was…. guilty of all counts. She noted that the obscure route they took, and Mackenzie’s previous visit to the route showed intent of a kind. She said that while it could not be proven that she didn’t intend also to kill herself, a murder-suicide that fails to be a suicide is still a murder. A closing line that unintentionally went pretty hard. 


The part of her judgment that became most memorable was the turn of phrase she used to describe Mackenzie’s driving: “Literal hell on wheels.”


Mackenzie Shirilla received two sentences of 15 years to life. The families of the victims argued that these sentences should be served consecutively, but Judge Russo allowed her to serve them concurrently. Which means, she will be up for parole in September of 2037, but without a successful appeal, that’s where her story ends for now.


Her mother continues to insist that they have evidence that’ll exonerate Mackenzie, and in the Netflix documentary, she outright claims that the story from July 17th — where Mackenzie threatened to crash the car with Dominic in it — was misrepresented by the prosecution. She said that she had evidence that showed it was Dominic who threatened to crash the car, not Mackenzie. Meanwhile, after the document aired, her husband was placed on administrative leave from his job as an art school teacher.


The parents of the victims have tried their best to move on, though you can tell from the Netflix doc that the pain is still sharp. Davion’s parents raised money for a scholarship fund, which would support another kid who wants to go to barber school like Davion did.


Throughout the research process, I’ve gone back and forth on whether I think Mackenzie planned this or whether it was a spur of the moment decision. If Angelo is to be believed, Dominic was planning on fully breaking up with Mackenzie, and somehow I think she knew it too. She really wanted to hold onto him – it’s a desire you even see in her memorial posts after his death.


And she does seem to be the sort of person who would try and scare the people she loves into getting what she wants.


During the investigation, police had interviewed an ex-boyfriend of hers named Tyler Proctor. He never testified, but I found his perspective to be an interesting one. He seemed to be of the opinion that Mackenzie wouldn’t have attempted a premeditated murder on Dominic, but was unstable enough to try and cause a car accident during an argument.


But that is where the case is today. Now I turn it over to you all, what do you think happened? You can leave me a comment wherever you listen, and I’ll be back here next week. 

Kaelyn Moore
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