Mackenzie Shirilla is back in the spotlight this week as a Netflix documentary, “The Crash,” premieres Friday and revisits the 2022 Ohio wreck that killed her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and his friend, Davion Flanagan.
Shirilla, 17 at the time, drove her Toyota Camry into the brick Plidco Building in Strongsville at 100 mph on July 31, 2022, around 5:30 a.m., after taking Russo and Flanagan from a friend’s house to Russo’s home, police and court evidence said.
The crash became one of the most closely watched juvenile murder cases in Ohio. Police arrived about 45 minutes later and found the car with severe damage and full airbag deployments. All three people were trapped inside, unconscious and not breathing. Russo and Flanagan were pronounced dead at the scene.
Prosecutors said the crash was intentional. An investigation of the car’s event data recorder found that Shirilla’s right foot was pressed fully to the accelerator and that the brakes were never applied before impact, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. They also described her relationship with Russo as toxic and cited a filing saying that two weeks before the crash she had threatened to wreck the car while he was a passenger. In that account, Russo had called his mother asking to be picked up during an argument, and a friend on the phone with him said he heard Shirilla say, “I will crash this car right now,” according to the filing.
Her family disputes that account. Natalie and Steve Shirilla told News on Thursday that they believe the evidence was false.
Shirilla was arrested on Nov. 4, 2022, about three months after the crash. On Aug. 14, 2023, when she was 19, she was found guilty in a bench trial of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, one count of drug possession and one count of possessing criminal tools.
The case has resurfaced because of the documentary, but the underlying facts have not changed: prosecutors say Shirilla drove into the building on purpose, while her parents say the prosecution’s version of events was wrong. What the new attention does is pull the case back into public view and put the convictions, already entered, back in front of a much larger audience.
