The sun hadn’t risen yet over Strongsville, Ohio, when three young people climbed into a 2018 Toyota Camry on July 31, 2022. It was 5:30 in the morning—that strange hour when the world belongs only to early risers, night shift workers, and teenagers who haven’t yet gone to bed.
Mackenzie Shirilla, seventeen years old with her whole life ahead of her, sat behind the wheel. Her boyfriend of four years, twenty-year-old Dominic Russo, settled into the passenger seat. In the back sat their friend, nineteen-year-old Davion Flanagan. They’d spent the night at parties, listening to music, sharing laughter and marijuana in the way young people do when they believe themselves invincible.
The engine started. The car pulled away from the curb. And within minutes, two young men would be gone forever, a teenage girl would wake up in a hospital with no memory of what happened, and investigators would begin unraveling a mystery that still divides families, legal experts, and anyone who examines the evidence three years later.
What happened in those final moments before the crash? Was it an accident—a medical emergency, a stuck shoe, a tragic series of unfortunate events? Or was it something darker, more deliberate, more unthinkable?
The answer depends on who you ask. And after three years, two trials, countless appeals, and a life sentence, we’re still not entirely sure.
The Girl Behind the Wheel
Mackenzie Shirilla was born in August 2004 to parents Natalie and Steve in Strongsville, Ohio—a comfortable suburb of Cleveland where neighbors knew each other and high school football games drew crowds on Friday nights. She was a student at Strongsville High School, living the kind of ordinary teenage life that doesn’t make headlines.
Until it did.
By all accounts, Mackenzie was like many teenagers—active on social media, always with her phone, documenting her life in photos and videos. What investigators would later discover in that digital footprint would become central to the case against her. Over one hundred instances of what they characterized as distracted or reckless driving appeared on her social media accounts—driving while smoking, running stop signs, speeding through neighborhoods.
But millions of teenagers drive recklessly and post about it online. Most of them never end up in criminal court. Most of them grow up, mature, look back on those years with embarrassment and gratitude that nothing terrible happened.
Mackenzie Shirilla would never get that chance.
Four Years of Love and Fighting
Dominic Russo was everything a mother hopes her son will become. A recent graduate of Strongsville High School, he was a young entrepreneur who ran several businesses, including a clothing line. He was a devoted uncle to his nieces and nephews, the kind of young man who showed up for family dinners and remembered birthdays.
He met Mackenzie when they were both students at Strongsville High School. According to his family, they dated for approximately four years—a significant chunk of time for teenagers, long enough for the relationship to become woven into the fabric of both families’ lives.
Christine Russo, Dominic’s mother, would later tell investigators that she considered Mackenzie part of the family. The young couple even moved in together toward the end of 2021, settling into one of the Russo family homes.
But beneath the surface of this teenage romance, cracks were forming—cracks that would eventually become chasms.
According to Christine, the relationship became increasingly strained in the six months before the crash. She observed fighting, arguments, disagreements, breakups, and reconciliations. The couple allegedly broke up and got back together many times over the years, according to Dominic’s brother.
Christine also noticed something else—Mackenzie becoming more possessive of her son.
In July 2022, just weeks before the tragedy, an incident occurred that would later be cited as evidence of premeditation. Dominic called his mother while he was with Mackenzie, seeming to be in what Christine described as a “bad situation”. A family friend, Christopher Martin, drove to pick up Dominic, who was in a vehicle with Mackenzie.
Martin, who was on the phone with Dominic during the drive, allegedly overheard Mackenzie saying something that would echo through the courtroom a year later: “I’m going to wreck this car right now”.
As Dominic exited the vehicle to join Martin, the family friend claimed to see Mackenzie swinging her hands at him.
Video footage recorded in July 2022 and discovered after Dominic’s passing also captured Mackenzie threatening to break into his home.
Were these the threats of an abusive partner planning something terrible? Or were they the dramatic outbursts of a volatile teenage relationship, the kind of things young people say in anger that they don’t truly mean?
That question would become central to everything that followed.
The Last Night
On the evening of July 30, 2022, Mackenzie, Dominic, and Davion attended several gatherings. Around 10:15 PM, the trio arrived at a graduation party at the home of Mackenzie’s friend Kellie Vraja. They stayed for less than an hour before moving on to another friend’s house.
Paul Burlinghaus would later testify that the group arrived at his home around 11 PM. They listened to music while some people smoked marijuana. According to Burlinghaus, “everything seemed fine” between Mackenzie and Dominic. There was no fighting, no tension, nothing that suggested the horror that would unfold just hours later.
Burlinghaus went to sleep around midnight, but the group continued hanging out in the early morning hours. According to data from a phone app, Mackenzie, Dominic, and Davion left the house around 5:30 AM on July 31.
It was the kind of summer night that teenagers have experienced for generations—staying up too late, laughing with friends, believing that tomorrow is promised and youth is eternal.
For Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan, there would be no tomorrow.
One Hundred Miles Per Hour
What happened next has been analyzed by forensic experts, reconstructed by investigators, debated by lawyers, and puzzled over by anyone who examines the evidence.
The drive began normally enough. Mackenzie slowed down to make a turn, used her blinker, and made a controlled turn off the main road. Nothing about her driving in those initial moments suggested anything was wrong.
Then she began to accelerate.
The road ahead was long and bumpy, featuring several curves. Despite the road’s conditions, Mackenzie accelerated to one hundred miles per hour over a span of more than twenty seconds. For context, that’s faster than most people have ever driven in their entire lives. That’s racetrack speed on a residential street in the predawn darkness.
According to the car’s event data recorder—the “black box” that modern vehicles carry to record information about crashes—Mackenzie’s foot never lifted from the gas pedal during this acceleration. She never applied the brakes.
At some point during those twenty seconds of acceleration, someone shifted the car from drive into neutral, then back into drive. Who did that? Was it Dominic or Davion, desperately trying to stop the vehicle? Was it Mackenzie herself, for reasons we may never understand? The car’s data recorder can tell us that it happened, but it cannot tell us why.
The Toyota Camry, now traveling at over one hundred miles per hour, crashed into a brick building.
The first responders wouldn’t arrive for forty-five minutes. When they did, they found a scene that would haunt them for years to come.
Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan were pronounced gone at the scene. They never had a chance. At that speed, hitting a brick wall, survival was impossible.
Mackenzie Shirilla was found unconscious, not breathing, her foot still pressing the accelerator pedal. Her fuzzy slipper was trapped between the gas pedal and the floor mat. She was rushed to a local hospital with serious injuries.
In her possession, investigators found psilocybin mushrooms and a digital scale. Toxicology tests would later reveal that she was under the influence of marijuana at the time of the crash.
The Investigation
In the days following the tragedy, Mackenzie publicly paid tribute to Dominic on social media. She wrote that he was “the last person to deserve this”. She shared photos of the couple on his obituary page, writing that she missed his “laugh” and “perfect smile”.
To the outside world, she appeared to be a grieving girlfriend, devastated by a terrible accident that had taken her beloved boyfriend and their friend.
But behind the scenes, investigators were beginning to suspect something else entirely.
They interviewed witnesses who described the couple’s volatile relationship. They reviewed the video footage of Mackenzie threatening to wreck her car just weeks before the crash. They analyzed data from Mackenzie’s phone, discovering that she had visited the industrial area where the crash occurred three days before the incident—a practice run, prosecutors would later argue.
Most damning of all was the forensic analysis of the crash itself.
Forensic mechanical expert Mark Sargent examined the car’s event data recorder and concluded that the vehicle was completely operational during the crash. The brakes were working. The steering was functional. There was no mechanical failure that could explain what happened.
The accelerator pedal was fully depressed with no application of the brake in the seconds before the collision. Mackenzie’s foot was on the gas when the crash occurred.
What about the fuzzy slipper trapped between the gas pedal and the floor mat? Could that explain the acceleration? Sargent didn’t think so. He concluded that the shoe “could not have been caught in such a way that it caused unintended acceleration prior to the crash”. The slipper was only stuck because of the deformation of the floorboard during the impact itself.
The car had also experienced a hard steering event to the right in the seconds before the crash. Was that Mackenzie attempting to regain control? Was it a passenger reaching for the wheel in a desperate attempt to avoid the collision? Was it a physical reaction to the car being briefly airborne before impact? Nobody knows.
What investigators did know was this: A teenage girl had accelerated to one hundred miles per hour on a bumpy residential road in the predawn darkness, never touched the brakes, and crashed into a brick wall, ending two young lives.
The question was why.
“Hell on Wheels”
Mackenzie Shirilla’s case went to a bench trial in 2023, meaning it was decided by a judge rather than a jury. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Nancy Margaret Russo—who is not related to the victim—would be the one to determine Mackenzie’s fate.
Prosecutors painted a picture of a young woman in a toxic relationship who decided that if she couldn’t have Dominic Russo, nobody would. They argued that Mackenzie had made the decision to crash the car deliberately, accelerating to a lethal speed and driving directly into a brick wall in an act of premeditated violence.
“She had a mission and she executed it with precision,” Judge Russo said before delivering her verdict. “The decision was ending in a loss of life”.
The judge described Mackenzie’s actions as “controlled, methodical, deliberate, intentional and purposeful”. She said the video evidence of the crash clearly showed that “this was not reckless driving. This was murder”.
In what would become one of the most quoted lines from the trial, Judge Russo referred to Mackenzie Shirilla as “literal hell on wheels”.
In August 2023, Mackenzie was found guilty of all twelve charges against her, including four counts each of felonious assault, two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, one count of drug possession, one count of possessing criminal tools, and four counts of the most serious charge—taking a life.
She was sentenced to two concurrent fifteen-year-to-life terms. She would be eligible for parole after fifteen years, meaning she could potentially be released when she’s in her early thirties. Her driver’s license was permanently suspended.
During the sentencing, Mackenzie addressed the families of Dominic and Davion with tears streaming down her face.
“To the families of Dom and Davion, I am so deeply sorry,” she said. “I hope one day you can see how I’d never let this happen or do it on purpose. I wish I could remember what happened. I’m just so sorry. I’m heartbroken”.
A Family Divided
The aftermath of the trial revealed deep divisions—not just between Mackenzie’s family and the victims’ families, but within the Russo family itself.
Dominic’s sister told PEOPLE magazine that she felt the sentences should have been run consecutively rather than concurrently. The idea that Mackenzie might be released in fifteen years was unbearable to her.
“My brother’s life and Davion’s life was completely stolen,” she said. “They don’t get out in fifteen years. They don’t come back in fifteen years. They don’t get any chance to live a life”.
But Dominic’s father, Frank Russo, expressed a different sentiment—one that surprised many people who followed the case.
“I lost my son, it’s harder on our family, but I don’t want the rest of her life ruined too. It isn’t going to make me feel any better,” he told NBC News after the sentencing. “She’s just a little kid. She made a mistake. She did a terrible thing but now her parents are destroyed, her family’s destroyed too. I wish there was a way she could get some kind of help, some kind of treatment”.
His words reflected something profound about grief and forgiveness—the recognition that more lives destroyed wouldn’t bring back the ones already lost.
The Parents Speak
For nearly three years after Mackenzie’s conviction, her parents, Steve and Natalie Shirilla, remained silent. They watched their daughter sentenced to life in prison. They endured the public condemnation, the media coverage calling her a calculated individual. They lived with the knowledge that their teenage daughter might spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Then, in May 2025, they finally spoke out.
“Show me one piece of evidence—one—that says she did this on purpose. Show it to me,” Steve told 3News. “Then she’s right where she belongs and she’s guilty of it. But there isn’t any. There’s no evidence of what was going on in that car other than information they gleaned from the black box”.
Steve and Natalie, working with a new legal team, presented evidence they claim was ignored during the original trial. A neurologist, Dr. Kamal Chemali, reviewed the case and concluded that the evidence is “consistent with loss of consciousness” for Mackenzie at the time of the crash.
According to this theory, Mackenzie suffered a medical event right before the crash—perhaps a seizure, perhaps some other neurological episode that caused her to lose consciousness while her foot remained on the accelerator.
The Shirilla family also pointed to text messages from Dominic that they say show he instigated many of the couple’s fights. They argue that the narrative of Mackenzie as an abusive, possessive girlfriend is incomplete and unfair.
Medical professionals who testified at the original trial stated there were no indications of a medical emergency at the time. But Mackenzie’s parents believe that the right questions weren’t asked, that the right evidence wasn’t considered.
“There’s another explanation,” Natalie said. An explanation that doesn’t involve their teenage daughter deliberately taking two lives.
The Questions That Haunt Us
Three years after the crash, Mackenzie Shirilla sits in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. She has filed appeals and post-conviction relief petitions. Her new legal team continues to fight, presenting new evidence, challenging the original verdict.
The courts have so far upheld her conviction. The appeals have been denied. By all legal measures, the case is closed. Mackenzie Shirilla intentionally crashed her car at one hundred miles per hour, taking two young lives in the process.
But for anyone who examines this case closely, questions remain—questions that keep people awake at night, questions that divide families and legal experts, questions that may never have satisfying answers.
If Mackenzie really planned to take lives, why did she do it with herself in the car? She was seriously injured in the crash. She easily could have been taken as well. What kind of planning includes your own potential end?
If this was truly premeditated, why did she use her turn signal and drive normally at first? Why not just accelerate from the beginning?
What about the shift from drive to neutral and back to drive? If Mackenzie was unconscious, who made that shift? If she was conscious and in control, why would she shift to neutral during her supposed plan?
The fuzzy slipper trapped between the gas pedal and the floor mat—could the experts be wrong? Could it have caused unintended acceleration that Mackenzie, perhaps impaired by marijuana and in a moment of panic, couldn’t correct?
What about the possibility of a medical event? Mackenzie claimed to have no memory of the crash. Is that a convenient lie, or could she truly have suffered some kind of neurological episode that caused her to black out while her foot remained on the accelerator?
And perhaps the most troubling question of all: Can we ever truly know what was in someone’s mind in the seconds before a tragedy? Can a black box tell us intent? Can witness statements about past behavior prove what happened in a specific moment?
The Victims We Remember
In all the legal battles, expert testimonies, and debates about evidence, it’s easy to lose sight of the two young men whose lives ended that morning.
Dominic Russo was twenty years old. He had his whole life ahead of him—businesses to build, nieces and nephews to watch grow up, perhaps a family of his own someday. His mother lost a son. His siblings lost a brother. His family will never be whole again.
Davion Flanagan was nineteen, a friend who happened to be in the wrong car at the wrong time. His parents launched a fundraiser for a barber school in his memory, trying to create something positive from their unbearable loss. He was someone’s son, someone’s friend, someone who mattered.
Their families don’t have the luxury of appeals and new evidence and the possibility of eventual release. Their sentence is permanent. Their loss is forever.
“We will never be whole again,” Dominic’s sister said. Those five words contain more truth than any verdict, any sentence, any legal proceeding can capture.
Where Justice and Mercy Meet
As of 2025, Mackenzie Shirilla remains incarcerated at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. She has served three years of her fifteen-year-to-life sentence. If she is granted parole at her first eligibility hearing, she will be in her early thirties when she is released—still young, still with most of her life ahead of her.
Dominic Russo would have been twenty-three years old now. Davion Flanagan would have been twenty-two. They don’t get to be in their thirties. They don’t get parole hearings or second chances.
The Russo family is divided on what justice looks like. Some believe Mackenzie should spend the rest of her life in prison, that anything less minimizes the magnitude of what she took from them. Others, like Frank Russo, believe that destroying another young life won’t bring back his son, that mercy and rehabilitation matter even in the face of terrible tragedy.
The Shirilla family maintains their daughter’s innocence, holding onto hope that new evidence will eventually exonerate her, that the truth will emerge and the world will understand that this was a tragic accident, not an act of intentional harm.
The legal system has spoken. The judge examined all the evidence and concluded that Mackenzie Shirilla intentionally crashed her car, that she chose a path that ended two young lives. The appellate courts have upheld that decision.
But the court of public opinion remains divided. Online forums debate the evidence endlessly. Some people are convinced of Mackenzie’s guilt, pointing to the threats she made, the relationship history, the forensic evidence from the crash. Others see reasonable doubt in every unanswered question, every alternative explanation, every piece of evidence that doesn’t quite fit the narrative.
The Truth We May Never Know
On a summer morning in 2022, three young people got into a car together. Minutes later, two of them were gone and one was unconscious, unable or unwilling to explain what happened.
Was it an accident—a medical emergency, a stuck shoe, marijuana-impaired judgment, a series of tragic decisions that spiraled out of control in seconds?
Or was it something darker—a young woman in a toxic relationship who made a calculated decision to end two lives in the most final way possible?
The judge who heard all the evidence believes she knows the answer. The prosecutors who built the case believe they proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. The forensic experts who analyzed the crash data believe the evidence speaks clearly.
But Mackenzie Shirilla says she doesn’t remember. And if that’s true—if she genuinely has no memory of those final seconds—then there’s a piece of this story that will forever remain locked away, inaccessible even to the person at the center of it all.
Her parents believe in her innocence with the fierce certainty that only parents can have. They see their daughter—the girl they raised, the teenager they loved—and they cannot reconcile that person with someone capable of such an act.
The victims’ families see a young woman who took everything from them, who sits in prison while their sons lie in graves. Some of them can find room for forgiveness and mercy. Others cannot. Both responses are valid. Both are human.
The Road Ahead
Mackenzie Shirilla will be eligible for parole in 2037. She will be in her early thirties, roughly the age Dominic and Davion would have been had they lived. The parole board will review her case, examine her conduct in prison, consider whether she has been rehabilitated, whether she poses a danger to society.
Some members of the Russo family have said they will fight any attempt at early release. Others have expressed a willingness to consider rehabilitation and mercy. The decision will ultimately rest with the parole board, weighing justice and punishment against reform and second chances.
Mackenzie’s legal team continues to file appeals, continues to present new evidence, continues to argue that the original trial got it wrong. Whether any of these efforts will succeed remains to be seen.
What we know for certain is this: On July 31, 2022, two promising young men passed away in a high-speed crash in Strongsville, Ohio. Their families will carry that grief for the rest of their lives. A teenage girl was convicted of ending their lives and will spend at least fifteen years in prison, possibly much longer. Her parents maintain her innocence and continue to fight for her freedom.
Everything else—the intent, the planning, what truly happened in those final seconds—exists in the space between evidence and interpretation, between what we can prove and what we can know.
The black box tells us the speed, the acceleration, the lack of braking. It tells us the mechanical facts of what the car did.
But it cannot tell us what was in Mackenzie Shirilla’s mind and heart in those final moments before impact. It cannot tell us whether this was an accident or an intention, whether she deserves our condemnation or our compassion.
That judgment we must each make for ourselves, knowing that we may never have all the answers, understanding that sometimes the truth is more complicated than either guilt or innocence, justice or mercy.
Three years after that terrible morning, Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan are still gone. Mackenzie Shirilla is still in prison. And the questions remain, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable, hovering over this tragedy like the summer morning mist that was just beginning to burn off when three young people climbed into a car and drove toward a fate that would change everything.
