MacKenzie Shirilla Secret Calls and Text That Netflix Didn’t Cover | The Crash

McKenzie Shirilla >> of McKenzie Shirilla. >> McKenzie Shirilla could face up to life in prison. >> Sentencing will take place tomorrow for 19-year-old McKenzie Shirilla. >> died >> Should she be in prison for aggravated vehicular homicide? >> May the truth set her free. >> Some cases make you stop everything you were doing and just stare at the screen.

This is one of them. A Netflix documentary recently dropped about the McKenzie Shirilla case. And the moment it ended, questions did not stop. They multiplied because what that documentary showed you was only part of the story. And what it left out is exactly what we are here to uncover today. If you are new here and you want more deep dives like this one, hit that subscribe button right now because we go places the headlines simply do not.

 And if you are already part of this community, welcome back because today we are getting into all of it. Let us start from the very beginning because to understand everything that came after, you need to understand what happened in the early hours of August 2nd, 2022, in Strongsville, Ohio. A silver Toyota Camry traveling at approximately 100 mph made absolutely no attempt to brake before slamming directly into the concrete wall of a parking garage.

There were three people in that car. Two of them never came home. Their names were Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. The driver was 19-year-old McKenzie Shirilla. She survived. Dominic Russo was 20 years old. Davion Flanagan was also 20 years old. These were two young men with entire futures ahead of them. Gone in a single violent moment on a quiet summer morning.

Their families were about to have their worlds completely destroyed. The investigation that followed would raise questions that still have not been fully answered even after a conviction, even after appeals were denied, and even after a major streaming platform gave the world a front row seat to one of the most debated criminal cases in recent history.

>> For the first time since her 2023 murder conviction, the parents of 20-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla are speaking out. Shirilla was 17 when she crashed her car, killing her boyfriend and their friend. In a 3 News Investigates exclusive, her parents insist it was an accident and not murder. They’re now sharing details of Mackenzie’s life in prison and fighting to clear her name, even as prosecutors stand by the evidence that put her behind bars.

>> The evidence that investigators collected in the hours, days, and weeks following that crash told a story that the defense never successfully dismantled. The vehicle’s event data recorder, commonly known as the black box, captured exactly what happened inside that car in the final seconds before impact. What it showed was not a mechanical malfunction.

 It was not a sudden medical emergency. The data recorded a sustained, deliberate acceleration to approximately 100 mph with a zero braking whatsoever before the vehicle struck the building. The car did not slow down. It sped up. And then there was the digital footprint left behind on Mackenzie’s phone. Investigators retrieved data from her device that placed her, or at the very least her cell phone, at that exact intersection just 3 days before Dominic and Davion lost their lives there.

A GPS hit right at the location of the impact 72 hours before the crash. That detail alone changes the entire conversation about what this event actually was. Accidents do not usually have a rehearsal run. Her phone contained much more than just location data. It also held videos of her driving under the influence on multiple occasions, filming herself while doing it.

 This was not a portrait of a careful, responsible young woman who made one terrible mistake. The digital record painted a consistent pattern of reckless decision-making behind the wheel, documented by a Mackenzie herself long before the fatal morning. The case went to trial as a bench trial, meaning the verdict rested not with a jury, but with a single judge.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Nancy Margaret delivered a ruling that was both detailed and methodical. She concluded that Mackenzie Shirilla had intentionally accelerated that vehicle into the wall. Mackenzie was convicted of two counts of murder, felonious assault, and aggravated vehicular homicide.

 She was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years to life in prison. Her legal team appealed the decision. The appeals were denied. The conviction stood. When the Netflix documentary titled Crash was released, it brought this case back into the national conversation in a massive way. Viewers who had never heard of Mackenzie Shirilla were suddenly watching interviews with her parents, hearing from friends, and being asked to consider whether justice had truly been served.

 Mackenzie’s parents made their position very clear. Her father sat in front of the camera and said, >> Show me one piece of evidence, one, that says she did this on purpose. Show it to me. Here it is. That’s it. Then she’s right where she belongs, then she’s guilty of it. But there isn’t any. >> He acknowledged that perhaps the charge of reckless vehicular homicide might have been appropriate, but he rejected the murder conviction entirely.

 Her mother echoed this position, expressing grief for the victims’ families, while absolutely maintaining that her daughter was innocent of intentionally causing their deaths. There is something that has to be said here, and it must be said carefully. These are parents, and their love for their child is not in question.

But the picture they painted of Mackenzie in that documentary does not align with the documented evidence presented at trial. In the film, her father spoke openly about allowing his daughter to move in with her boyfriend when she was just 17 years old, reasoning that she was mature enough. He also acknowledged that he was aware she smoked marijuana, stating that given all the things she could have been doing, it seemed like the least bad option.

 Meanwhile, investigators had already recovered videos from her phone showing her filming herself driving while under the influence. The maturity her father described and the behavior documented on her own phone exist in direct contradiction to one another. Following the release of the documentary, reports emerged that McKenzie’s father had been placed on administrative leave from his position as an art and digital video teacher at Mary Queen of Peace School, a private Catholic institution in the Cleveland area.

The school communicated with parents stating that a staff member had been placed on leave following allegations of poor judgment. They emphasized that the safety, well-being, and trust of students remained among their highest priorities, committing to respond responsibly to any concerns brought forward by the community.

 People who knew McKenzie during her school years gave accounts in the documentary that sharply contrasted with how her parents described her. Former classmates spoke about her bullying behavior, targeting other students, spreading rumors, and creating conflicts seemingly without provocation. One person described having a falling out with McKenzie after she spread lies and put them on social media.

 Another referenced nearly coming to physical confrontations with her on more than one occasion. Yet, at the same time, one of McKenzie’s close friends appeared in the documentary and described a completely different person, someone warm, friendly, and incapable of intentionally hurting anyone. These two portraits cannot both be fully accurate.

 Someone is describing a different McKenzie than the other. And the gap between those two versions is worth paying close attention to. That friend, identified as Rosie, had a significant social media following at the time of the crash, reportedly around 200,000 followers, which has since grown to nearly a million.

 What struck investigators and outside observers alike was that despite her massive platform, she never used it to publicly address the crash or express anything about what had happened to two people within social circle, not once. However, when Netflix came calling with the opportunity to be part of a documentary, she agreed to participate.

What made this even more notable was that Rosie, along with another person named Landon, who was also featured in the film, had previously refused to cooperate with detectives during the active criminal investigation. They declined to speak with law enforcement, yet they sat down for a streaming production.

 The lead investigator on the case addressed this pattern directly, noting that their refusal to cooperate with police while agreeing to appear on camera raised legitimate questions. Davon Flanagan’s sister has spoken out since the documentary aired, and her words have been some of the most candid contributions to the public conversation around this case.

She took to social media to set several records straight. She confirmed that Landon was not Davon’s best friend, acknowledging they had a friendship, but clarifying that there were roughly 10 people who came before Landon in terms of closeness to her brother. She also noted that she had been present at many of the same social gatherings as the people featured in the documentary.

She described McKenzie as the first person who ever peer pressured her into trying marijuana, an act that caused her brother Davon to react strongly, making his feelings about McKenzie very clear from that point forward. She addressed the framing of the documentary directly, noting that the friends presented as Dominic’s friends were more accurately McKenzie’s friends.

 They were acquaintances of Dominic, moving in the same social orbit, but they were not as close friends. She found it deeply troubling that people fitting that description were speaking critically about him in front of a global audience. Dominic Russo’s sister has also spoken publicly since the release, including through a podcast she started to address the case.

 Her account reinforced many of the same points, emphasizing that Dominic’s actual closest friends were largely not part of the documentary at all. She also addressed something that struck many who watched the film closely. In the documentary, Dominic’s father was shown receiving the news from police that his son had died.

He appeared remarkably calm for a parent receiving that information. The explanation, which became clear through additional context not included in the documentary, was that Dominic’s mother had already been notified separately. Body cam footage captured that initial notification. It is one of the most harrowing pieces of media connected to this case.

It shows a mother being told that her son is gone, and her immediate, instinctive, primal response being the question, “What did she do?” Not, “Was it an accident?” Not, “What happened?” “What did she do?” That footage was not included in the Netflix documentary, but the grief it captured, raw, unfiltered, and completely unscripted, tells you everything about what was lost that morning.

 It reveals a mother’s intuition that this was no accident, aligning perfectly with the black box data and the ultimate verdict of the court. There is also the matter of what happened after McKenzie’s incarceration began. A woman who was locked up alongside McKenzie came forward publicly with a striking claim. She stated that the Mackenzie shown in the Netflix documentary, the soft-spoken, emotional young woman giving her interview, was not the person she had observed inside.

According to this former inmate, what viewers saw on screen was a performance. The Mackenzie she described from her time inside was a fundamentally different person from the one presented to a global audience. And then there are the communications. Phone calls made from correctional facilities are routinely monitored and recorded.

Mackenzie’s communications during her incarceration were no exception. The content of those calls, the things she said, the tone she used, and the specific conversation she had, represents a dimension of this story that the documentary completely ignored. That dimension matters immensely because it speaks directly to the question at the center of everything.

Who was Mackenzie Shirilla really when no one is crafting the narrative around her? That is exactly where we are going next. The secret calls, the hidden texts, the people she was speaking to, and what was actually said behind closed doors. Because the version of this story that you were told was heavily edited, and the parts that were cut are the parts that change everything.

 If this video has you thinking, and if you want to know the truth that was left on the cutting room floor, make sure you are subscribed to the channel. Hit that like button if you believe this story deserves to be told in full. And stay right here because the rest of this is going to expose exactly what they did not want you to hear.

Now, the last thing from what I said was about a mother’s voice cutting through her own grief, asking not what happened, but what did she do? That question did not come from the investigation, did not come from the courtroom. It came from a mother’s gut in the first seconds of the worst moment of her life. And that instinct, it turned out, aligned perfectly with everything the evidence would later confirm.

 But the story does not end with the conviction. It does not end with a sentence. Because while Dominic Russo and Devin Flanigan’s families were learning how to carry an absence that never gets lighter, something else was happening on the other side of this case entirely. And that is where we are going right now. Mackenzie Shirilla was given an opportunity to speak in the Netflix documentary.

Her interview came toward the end of the film, and she said very little. What she did say was that she had no intent to harm anyone, and that she believed she may have experienced an episode of POTS, a medical condition affecting blood pressure and heart rate, which she suggested could explain why the crash occurred.

She offered this not in a courtroom where it could be tested and challenged, but in a controlled documentary setting with her attorney present on a global streaming platform. And at the very end of that interview, after the cameras had captured whatever she wanted the world to see, she turned to her lawyer and asked whether she had said everything she needed to say.

Sit with that for a moment. Not did I say everything I wanted to say. Not is there anything important I left out. Everything she needed to say. The framing of that question tells you something about the purpose of that interview. Mackenzie Shirilla will be eligible for her first parole hearing in 2037. That interview was not about closure.

 It was not about accountability. It was about positioning. And the people who noticed that detail noticed it for a reason. A woman with a background in forensic psychology and law enforcement watched the documentary and offered a perspective that cuts through the surface of Mackenzie’s carefully constructed presentation.

 She was careful to note the limits of her observations, acknowledging that she does not hold a doctoral degree and cannot clinically diagnose anyone based on the documentary appearance. With that important context established, what she described was striking. She observed a consistent incongruence between the upper and lower halves of McKenzie’s face throughout the interview.

 The top half performed sadness. The brow was furrowed. The eyes were wide and downcast, projecting exactly the emotional register that the moment called for. But the bottom half told a different story. The corners of her mouth would twitch upward. A smirk would emerge briefly before being suppressed. The performed expression would slip and then be hastily reconstructed.

 This kind of facial incongruence, she explained, is significant because genuine emotion tends to move across the face as a unified expression. When the top and bottom halves of the face are doing contradictory things, it often indicates that the emotion being displayed is not being felt. McKenzie, in her assessment, understood intellectually what she was supposed to feel and made a deliberate effort to project it.

 But the projection kept breaking down because the underlying emotional reality was not there to sustain it. She went further, describing McKenzie’s behavioral profile as consistent with narcissistic tendencies and noting that the relationship dynamic between McKenzie and Dominic showed clear patterns of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse with McKenzie as the aggressor.

She observed that this dimension of the relationship was not adequately addressed in the documentary despite being a potentially critical factor in understanding what happened on August 2nd, 2022. Now, here is where the story goes somewhere the documentary never went. A woman named Kat came forward publicly after the documentary aired.

 Kat had been incarcerated at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, the same facility where McKenzie is currently serving her sentence. She provided institutional documentation to support her account showing her own admission date and Mackenzie’s admission date at the same facility. Her timeline overlapped with the beginning of Mackenzie’s sentence, meaning she was present during the period when Mackenzie first arrived and began navigating life inside.

 And what Cat described is a portrait that is unrecognizable compared to the soft-spoken, sorrowful young woman who appeared on that Netflix screen. According to Cat, Mackenzie arrived at the facility with the social instincts she had apparently always operated by. She was focused on status. She wanted to be seen as someone important, someone at the center of the social hierarchy, even within a prison environment.

 Cat described her as someone who walked the yard without a visible trace of remorse, never crying, never appearing to be weighed down by the reality of what she had done. Instead, Mackenzie’s apparent preoccupation was with finding her place among the people she considered worth knowing. Cat noted that this did not go the way Mackenzie seemed to expect.

The social dynamics inside a correctional facility are not navigated the same way they are in a high school hallway or on a social media platform. And Mackenzie, according to Cat, did not fit in the way she anticipated. What Cat also observed was that Mackenzie’s pattern of seeking intense, chaotic relationships did not stop at the prison gates.

 Within the relatively short period Cat was incarcerated alongside her, she witnessed Mackenzie cycle through multiple toxic relationship dynamics inside the facility. The behavior that investigators and the victims’ families had described as characteristic of Mackenzie before the crash appeared to be continuing unchanged in a completely different environment.

 People do not typically change their core behavioral patterns simply by changing their location. And McKenzie, based on Kat’s account, was demonstrating exactly that. Kat also addressed something that speaks directly to the enabling dynamic her family established long before the crash ever happened. McKenzie’s mother, according to Kat, was funding her daughter’s prison lifestyle from the outside.

 Money was being sent in regularly. Commissary items, makeup, limited products that require financial resources to obtain inside a facility. McKenzie had access to all of it. The family that allowed her to move in with a boyfriend at 17, that rationalized her substance use as the least harmful option available, was now ensuring that even incarceration came with as much comfort as could be arranged.

The enabling did not end with the conviction. It simply changed form. A second woman who had served time at the Ohio Reformatory for women added broader context about the facility itself. Her account described an environment that, while still a prison, offers conditions that many members of the public would find surprising given the severity of the offenses that land people there.

She described access to a beauty school within the facility, the ability to purchase food items beyond standard institutional meals, relationship dynamics playing out openly on the yard, and a general atmosphere that she characterized as significantly less severe than the punitive image the word prison tends to conjure.

She was careful not to dismiss the seriousness of incarceration as a consequence, but her account raises a question that does not have a comfortable answer. When two young men are permanently absent from the world, when their mothers wake up every single morning to the fact that they are never coming back, what does proportional consequence actually look like? Now, we need to talk about something that happened very early in this investigation because it revealed something important about how Mackenzie and the people closest to her responded

to the crash from the very beginning. In the hours following the incident, while investigators were still piecing together what had happened, Mackenzie was interviewed. Her mother was also present. What investigators documented was that the two of them communicated with each other in a coded, distorted version of English, something resembling Pig Latin, directly in front of the detectives conducting the interview, trained law enforcement professionals who are specifically equipped to identify and interpret attempts to obscure

communication. And within that exchange, investigators alleged that Mackenzie asked her mother whether she could tell police that she had experienced a seizure, floating a fabricated medical explanation as a potential cover story in the immediate aftermath of the crash that killed two people. In a separate moment from that same early investigative period, Mackenzie allegedly asked the detectives directly whether they could simply take her driver’s license away for 10 years as a resolution to the situation.

10 years for two deaths. That question, as much as anything else in this case, encapsulates the gap between Mackenzie’s apparent understanding of what she had done and the reality of what two families were about to spend the rest of their lives carrying. The recorded phone calls from Mackenzie’s time in custody add yet another dimension to this portrait.

Prison phone calls are routinely monitored and recorded, a fact that is communicated to incarcerated individuals. Despite this, the conversations that Mackenzie had with her mother were captured reflecting a tone and a set of priorities that are deeply difficult to reconcile with the image of a grieving, remorseful young woman.

>> And please don’t forget to change my Instagram bio. Try to get into that one Instagram account and change my name to that. >> Okay. That can be that may That may look bad right now. Okay. I’ll put free candy on there, but that’s going to look bad. How was How did you sleep? >> Okay. I was kind of up and like sleeping and not sleeping.

 I really want my iPad though. >> Do they have any idea when they’re going to bring it to you? Do you have any idea? Haven’t heard. >> No. I’m about to ask. Can you call and ask? Please, please, please. >> No. I can’t, Kenzie. >> Because it’s because um the last time I called about your thing, they were like, “If I do that, then that’s special treatment, Kenzie.

 You’ll get it when you get it.” >> Why the [ __ ] man? >> In one recorded call, Kenzie’s mother told her that the case was everywhere. That it had spread to national news and then further, appearing in international outlets, including a publication in the United Kingdom. The response from Kenzie and her mother was not solemnity.

It was not reflection. It was laughter. Giggling about the reach of the story. A suggestion to create a social media page in Kenzie’s name. And then, the moment that has stayed with everyone who has heard it. The genuine, hopeful expression that maybe, now that the story had gone global, someone like Kim Kardashian might reach out.

 And the response, “I was going to do this anyway. So, this is great.” Dominic Russo’s mother asked what she did in the first seconds of learning her son was gone. And on the other side of this case, Kenzie and her mother were laughing about international coverage and hoping for celebrity attention. >> Kenzie. >> Hm? >> It’s on the Today show.

>> What? >> Girl, I’m telling you they’re about to ready for the biggest plot twist of the century. Right? >> What? What did they say about me? >> No, no, no. It’s not on the TV. It’s just online and they’re just reposting the story, but that’s okay. That’s okay, right? That’s all right. Black twist. Right? That’s okay.

Write your book. Start writing your book. You hear what I’m saying? >> Guys, I just I know I have this feeling that something’s going to happen like with all these people reaching out. It like makes me feel like >> Yeah. >> Like remember that one guy who got arrested for murder? And he became like a model because he was just like everyone’s like loving his mug shot.

>> Hell yeah, that was hot. >> I remember that guy. Like I watched that >> movie with him in it. >> You did? >> Yes. >> Oh my god. >> It’s called The Secret Society. It’s a good as well. >> Yeah, he got >> know Yeah, it’s fine. >> Jeez, no. He was arrested for murder. He probably didn’t even do anything. >> These two realities existed simultaneously.

 They still exist simultaneously. Every time Dom’s family marks another year without him. Every time Dom’s sister speaks his name in the present tense. Because that is the only way love knows how to speak. This is the other side of the story. McKenzie’s parents also used the documentary to introduce a new element into the public conversation.

They claim that text messages exist in which McKenzie told Dominic’s own mother that during an argument on a highway two weeks before the crash Dominic had grabbed the steering wheel himself and attempted to cause an accident. They stated their intention to use these texts in future appeal proceedings. Dominic’s sister addressed this directly and without hesitation.

Her assessment was clear. This was manipulation. This was McKenzie doing what she had always done. Which was managing her image, deflecting responsibility and finding a way to make herself the sympathetic figure in a story where she was the one behind the wheel. Sending that particular message to Dominic’s mother of all people was not an accident poor judgment.

 It was a calculated move and Dom’s sister recognized it immediately for what it was. One of Dominic’s actual closest friends, a man named Blair, also spoke publicly following the documentary’s release. His account was direct. He described certain individuals who appeared in the film presenting themselves as Dominic’s friends as people he characterized as clout-hungry.

More interested in the platform the documentary provided than in honoring the person they claimed to be representing. He also raised something that stops you cold. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, be before any documentary, before any trial, McKenzie had reportedly attempted to pursue a modeling opportunity.

Two people were dead and she was attempting to leverage the attention into a professional opportunity. The GPS evidence that investigators presented at trial remains one of the most significant factual anchors of this entire case. An investigator stated clearly and on the record that McKenzie drove the same route and visited the exact location of the crash site just days before the incident occurred.

Her phone placed her at that intersection 3 days before Dominic Russo and Davon Flanigan died there. The investigator characterized it explicitly as a dry run. In the investigator’s own words, McKenzie knew that street and the evidence suggested she knew exactly what she intended to do when she turned onto it.

Davon Flanigan was not originally supposed to be in that car. According to accounts presented in the documentary, he had not planned to ride home with Dominic and McKenzie that night. He made a last-minute decision to accept the ride, a spontaneous choice, the kind people make without a second thought on an ordinary night, placed him in a vehicle that was, if the evidence is to be believed, already on a predetermined course.

He was 20 years old. He had a sister who loved him fiercely enough to launch a podcast and build a scholarship fund in his name. He had friends whose lives were permanently marked by losing him. And his presence in that car that night was a result of nothing more than a simple, casual decision that no one could have known would be the last one he ever made.

Dominic and Devan deserve more than what happened to them. Their families deserve more than what they have been put through since. And the truth of this case, the documented, evidenced, legally adjudicated truth deserve to be told in full, not curated for a streaming platform. If this story has moved you, if these names mean something to you now, please make sure you are subscribed so you never miss the cases that demand to be heard.

 Hit the like button if you believe Dominic Russo and Devan Flanagan’s story deserves to be told completely and honestly. We will keep going. We always do.