Murder Convict Claims She's the Real Victim in Fatal Crash

In a jail call that captures the mindset of someone facing serious prison time, Mackenzie Shirilla told her mother she wanted to testify in her own murder trial—convinced that if jurors heard her story, they’d understand the truth: that this was just a car accident, and she was the one who lost everything.

Shirilla was 17 when she crashed her car head-first into a brick building at over 100 MPH in July 2022, killing her then-boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan. Both were passengers. In audio from a conversation at Cuyahoga County Corrections Center in Ohio, she explained to her mother Natalie why she pushed back against her defense team’s decision to keep her off the stand.“If they see the truth, then they’ll know that this was nothing but a car accident. They’ll just see that there’s a third victim, and it’s me, and I lost the love of my life and a good friend, and now I have to deal with this grief the rest of my life,”she said.

Her attorney apparently wasn’t convinced that testifying would help. The lawyer told her:“I don’t know if that’s a good idea at this point.”Shirilla disagreed—frustrated enough to plead with her mom to pay her $500,000 bond and get her out of jail, using language that made clear she felt the system was stacked against her.

Days after the call, Shirilla was convicted of murder, felonious assault, aggravated vehicular homicide, and other charges. She’s now serving two concurrent 15-to-life sentences and won’t be eligible for parole until 2037. The case has drawn renewed attention thanks to Netflix’s documentary“The Crash,”which explores how a teenager’s deadly decision behind the wheel changed multiple lives forever.

What’s striking about Shirilla’s jail conversation isn’t just her claim of victimhood—it’s how it reveals a disconnect between her own understanding of the event and the legal reality of what the crash represented. Her defense team likely knew that putting her on the stand could backfire, allowing prosecutors to press her on details that suggested intent rather than accident. Her insistence that this was“nothing but a car accident”doesn’t align with how the justice system viewed a 100-plus mph collision into a building that killed two people.