Did Mackenzie Shirilla Really Mean to Kill?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruskie. Here now, Tony Bruskie.

[00:00:07]Have we all seen The Crash over on Netflix yet? Hmm?

[00:00:11]We're going to get into that in this video today and I want you to weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. Where am I landing on it?

[00:00:21]As as most things, there's a lot to consider here and we're going to go through all of it. I'm not just going to go down one lane and railroad this one to I'm going to really try and make you think.

[00:00:36]If you're this side or that side or the other side or whatever side cuz I honest to God, I don't I don't I don't think there is a side here. I think there's an observation and an understanding that needs to be made about the mindset of a 16-year-old, 17-year-old, whatever, at the time of this horrible crash.

[00:00:58]An understanding that being a nasty, narcissistic, self-centered little [ __ ] doesn't always make you a murderer.

[00:01:10]Doesn't always make you a >> [laughter] >> murderer.

[00:01:14]Um it might just make you a 17-year-old girl.

[00:01:19]And look, there's the same version of it for boys, too. I'm not just, you know, making it about women or anything like that.

[00:01:27]I'm saying it's very difficult to judge one's motives, one's decisions based on actions or words that were expelled from the mouth of a teenager months or weeks or years before the actual event happened as some sort of gospel that foretells the future.

[00:01:50]If you have a teenager at home, if you've been a teenager, you should understand this. I mean just I mean the the cornucopia of information that flows through the teenage mind that changes dramatically day to day, hour to hour, week to week, month to month. The contradictions are insane when it comes to relationship dynamics. They're insane. They're up, they're down. And you might be like, "I was really calm.

[00:02:17]My daughter's really calm. My son's great." Consider yourself lucky.

[00:02:22]Consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

[00:02:26]Because it's chaos. It's a land of chaos, and sometimes horrible things happen.

[00:02:35]Anyway, I'm not here to tell you to believe this way or the other way.

[00:02:40]But I did watch the doc last night, and that's about as raw as a reaction as you're going to get out of me. That was completely unscripted. That was the first time I have expressed aloud whatever thoughts I have on this.

[00:02:57]That's just all coming out at once.

[00:03:02]But I've I've I've put together some thoughts that hit in all different areas of this.

[00:03:09]So, I hope you'll you'll you'll continue to join me here and and and and listen and give your thoughts in the comments on Substack and YouTube.

[00:03:18]So, to really kind of frame this, if you haven't watched the doc on Netflix, I suggest doing it. It's only an hour and a half. It's not like an eight-part thing where you're going to invest half your weekend.

[00:03:29]It can be done in an hour and a half, and it's a pretty compelling documentary.

[00:03:33]Does it feel like it kind of goes in one lane and stays there? A bit. But again, it gets you talking. It gets you thinking, and that's what this is all about. Especially if you don't have a dog in the fight, it gets you thinking.

[00:03:47]And exercising this up here is always a good thing.

[00:03:52]So, let's go back to July 2nd of 2022.

[00:03:55]Dominic Russo sent McKenzie Shirilla a text message.

[00:04:00]He told her he loved her, told her he didn't think they should be together anymore. He mentioned the constant fights, the breakups that never stuck, the threats.

[00:04:12]He said there wasn't very much time on Earth and maybe they should just let each other go and find happiness somewhere else. You know, the way you know, teenagers break up where it almost it feels like as you get older, [laughter] the wording sometimes in teenage breakups almost sounds like marriages dissolving because there's not a lot of context to life and everything seems like it could possibly be the end of the world.

[00:04:40]They don't know this because well, they're teenagers and they don't have the context to build their thought processes with. They don't have reps.

[00:04:51]So, you get speech like like this.

[00:04:55]Something I mean, I mean, I mean, and give him credit. I mean, honest to God for like realizing there's not much time in this world and you're a teenager, damn, that's a good observation because a lot of teenagers at that point in time are like I got all the time in the world.

[00:05:11]>> [laughter] >> And then you're 40 something.

[00:05:13]He wasn't angry, he wasn't cruel, he was this case, he was actually a 20-year-old kid trying to do the mature thing in a relationship that he'd been basically [clears throat] burning both of them alive for months metaphorically.

[00:05:30]29 days later, Dominic Russo was dead in the passenger seat of McKenzie Shirilla's Toyota Camry pinned against a brick wall of a commercial building in Strongsville, Ohio.

[00:05:43]Their friend Davion Flanagan, 19 years old, was dead in the backseat and Mackenzie, 17, unconscious.

[00:05:51]Her Prada slipper still pressed against the accelerator was being extracted from the wreckage and airlifted to a hospital.

[00:05:59]A judge would later call her hell on wheels and say her mission was death.

[00:06:04]Her family says she's innocent and nearly 4 years later people who looked at the exact same evidence still can't agree on who's right.

[00:06:12]And I'm not here to tell you I know either. I There's one person who knows what was going on in that mind and that is that is the driver. That is Mackenzie. That is the one person who truly knows the answer to that question and um I'm not saying you have to take her at her word, but she is still alive and she says she has no memory of this.

[00:06:36]And there are possible routes where that could be an accurate statement.

[00:06:41]Netflix uh dropped The Crash in May and it went straight to a number one. The documentary does what true crime documentaries do. It gives you the footage, the texts, the tearful families, the stone-faced prosecutor, and the convicted woman speaking from prison for the first time. It's well constructed. It's compelling, and it leaves you with the same question you walked in with, which is did Mackenzie Shirilla deliberately drive her car into a building at 100 miles an hour to kill her boyfriend or did something else happen that morning that nobody has been able to explain? Well, a court decided, the families have decided, the internet has decided, depending on which comment section you're reading, but the evidence itself hasn't decided. The evidence just just sits there pointing in multiple directions at once and daring you to pick one.

[00:07:34]So, let's look at what we actually know. In the morning of July 31st, 2022, at roughly 5:30 in the morning, McKenzie was driving Dominic and Davion home from a friend's house. She turned her 2018 Toyota Camry into Alameda Drive in a quiet industrial area of Strongsville, a suburb about 20 miles south of Cleveland. Surveillance cameras captured what happens next. The car made a controlled turn onto a road, then accelerated. It traveled nearly half a mile reaching close to 100 miles an hour before slamming head-on into a brick wall of a building. No skid marks, no sign of braking or hesitation. Dominic and Davion were pronounced dead at the scene. McKenzie was amazingly alive, unconscious, and had to be cut out of the car.

[00:08:26]This is I just want to pause here for a second because this is not something one would go into and and and go, "I might survive this. Let's give this a shot."

[00:08:37]I mean I Again, could the thinking have been completely construed and and could have someone been thinking, "I'll survive.

[00:08:45]I'll just kill the person in my backseat and next to me and I'll survive going straight into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour."

[00:08:56]Cognitive distortion thought, maybe?

[00:08:59]Suicide that that I yeah.

[00:09:03]Got to be careful using that word here.

[00:09:05]Um thoughts of of of doing this to oneself?

[00:09:11]You got to assume if she's going at 100 miles an hour, she's ready to leave the planet as well.

[00:09:17]But was it that or is it some weird combination of all this or is it a medical emergency? Again, these are all the questions that are up in the air.

[00:09:30]At first, it looked like a horrific accident. A teenager driving too fast too early in the morning, possibly impaired. First responders found weed in the vehicle and psilocybin mushrooms concealed in McKenzie's belongings, but the toxicology came back and complicated things. There was no psilocybin in her system and no alcohol, only THC. And according to the prosecutor Tim Troop, McKenzie smoked regularly and was accustomed to driving with THC in her system. Doesn't make it okay.

[00:09:58]Okay?

[00:09:59]I'm I'm certainly saying that, but I I'll tell you what, usually doesn't make people floor it into a brick wall, either.

[00:10:09]A forensic auto examiner checked the car and found no mechanical failure. The brakes worked, the steering worked, the accelerator worked, the tires were fine.

[00:10:17]And then investigators pulled the black box data and the accelerator pedal had been pressed to 100%. It was floored.

[00:10:27]100% capacity for an extended period before impact. The brake pedal never applied. The steering wheel showed slight adjustments left, then right, then straightened in the final seconds before the car actually hit the wall.

[00:10:43]That surveillance footage became the centerpiece of the prosecution's case.

[00:10:46]And I'll be honest with you, when when you watch it, your stomach kind of drops.

[00:10:53]The car looks controlled, the acceleration looks sustained, the trajectory looks deliberate. The judge who convicted McKenzie called it the type of evidence you can never unsee.

[00:11:04]And she's right about that part, you can't unsee it.

[00:11:07]But here's the question that nobody in the documentary really fully sits with that long. What exactly does that footage prove? It proves the car accelerated, it proves the car didn't brake, it proves the steering wheel moved. What it doesn't prove, what it can't prove, is what was happening inside the mind of the person behind the wheel. A conscious driver making corrections could be aiming at the wall, a panicked driver could also be making corrections, a driver in a dissociative state, a rage blackout, a medical event.

[00:11:35]Any of those scenarios could produce some sort of steering input. The footage shows the car.

[00:11:42]It does not show the intent.

[00:11:45]But the prosecution had more than footage. They had the relationship. They had the 93,000 text messages and the ones they pulled out were ugly.

[00:11:58]Mackenzie texting Dominick, "I told you it's my way or the highway. I would watch your back from now on and your house and your car and your life and any of your friends." Dominick texting back, "Kenzie, this isn't right and you know it." Arguments about money, about loyalty, about control, ultimatums with countdown timers. "I'm giving you 10 minutes starting now." She reportedly threatened to key his car, tried to break into his house when he wouldn't let her in, sent messages saying she wanted to harm herself. 93,000 messages and the prosecution found the worst ones to put them in front of the judge. Now, they again, the prosecution, you're going to you're going to probably [clears throat] do that.

[00:12:42]But in 93,000 messages from teenagers, you're going to find utter chaos.

[00:12:49]You're not going to find the best thinkers. You're not going to find the most rational reasoning going on in any sense of the word.

[00:13:00]And you're also going to find a lot of information and a lot of threats, if you want to call them that, that are 1,000% empty and the ramblings of a teenager.

[00:13:13]Again, does it excuse anything? Does it give us some context as to who this person is? Yeah, it it does.

[00:13:20]It really does and she doesn't appear to be the nicest of human beings.

[00:13:24]She appears to be a self-centered narcissistic little c u, yeah.

[00:13:30]1,000% Now, again, context, age, life experience.

[00:13:42]Uh some people are going to go through this.

[00:13:46]Some call it a phase. Some end up calling it a lifestyle and really never change this way of thinking. And And And who's to know yet, quite honestly, who she is becoming. Who Who she will be one day.

[00:14:06]Who she was then and who she is now.

[00:14:08]Who she would have been had she never been arrested.

[00:14:12]Could have been this out-of-control, chaotic, self-centered monster that was going to continue to scroll through lives and boyfriends and relationships and friendships and everything is going to all end with her holding her phone up going, Who knows?

[00:14:34]Who knows?

[00:14:40]That seemed to be the track she was on.

[00:14:44]But again, I must caution you, if you have teenagers and you are present in their life, around their their friends or their acquaintances or their classmates or you just go to a their school for a concert or whatever and then you're around other people of that age and you're an adult, you will find a great deal of the population to also have a very similar mental makeup.

[00:15:16]Certainly not everybody. There's There's lovely kids out there without a doubt.

[00:15:22]And there's these little narcissistic monsters.

[00:15:26]And unfortunately, a lot of these little narcissistic monsters don't have the best of parenting going on around them to help steer them one way or another.

[00:15:33]Some do, and they're still little narcissistic monsters.

[00:15:38]And sometimes you have to get kicked in the ass in life enough to knock that [ __ ] out of you.

[00:15:48]Some have it happen just through normal wear and tear of life and nobody gets harmed too badly.

[00:15:55]Some have absolutely horrific tragic [ __ ] like this happen to them.

[00:16:00]Does it make that person have the intent of murdering their friends or their boyfriends? Usually not. Could it?

[00:16:11]Yeah.

[00:16:12]Could [snorts] there be an impulse that takes place in that heat of the moment of that reaction to whatever information came across where she thinks, "This is all this is it. Screw you." Yeah, that could be true, too.

[00:16:30]Again, context. Not dismissing anything here, but let's let's fully understand what's going on. Cuz again, I'm not here to tell you it's this way or that way. I'm just here let's look at the big picture and fully understand what we're dealing with.

[00:16:46]There was also July 17th, 2 weeks before the fatal crash. McKenzie and Dominic were driving on Interstate 71. They were fighting again. A friend was on the phone with Dominic when he heard McKenzie say five words, "I will crash this car right now."

[00:17:02]She didn't crash it. She pulled over.

[00:17:03]Dominic got out. A friend came and picked him up. The friend later told investigators she saw McKenzie reportedly striking Dominic as he tried to leave the car. That incident gets treated the in the documentary and in the trial like a dress rehearsal.

[00:17:19]Like proof of premeditation.

[00:17:22]And I understand why it reads that way, but it can also be read as something else entirely.

[00:17:27]A volatile teenager saying something reckless in a fight and then not doing it. People say terrible things in arguments. It's about the same as planning a murder.

[00:17:38]And here's where I think the case gets genuinely complicated and then where most of the coverage, including the documentary, doesn't go deep enough.

[00:17:44]Everything about Mackenzie Shirilla's personality makes you want to believe the worst about her. The Tik Tok influencer persona, the selfie-obsessed social media presence, the Prada slippers. When she was arrested 3 months after the crash, she asked the officers to be careful not to break her bracelets. Not because it was about vanity, it was because bracelets had been gifts from Dominic and they were on her arm. And some of those bracelets don't necessarily come off without being broken. A fellow inmate who spent 6 months locked up with her said the remorseful, soft-spoken woman in the Netflix documentary was nothing like the person she saw behind bars. She described Mackenzie as someone who treated prison like a high school popularity contest, doing her makeup, playing the social hierarchy. All of that feeds a narrative, cold, calculated, and performing.

[00:18:35]She was initially a 17-year-old girl going from that world into a prison system. It doesn't necessarily change everything about you like that.

[00:18:50]And it may not change anything at all.

[00:18:51]That may just be who she is.

[00:18:55]But I want you to sit with something for a second. Narcissism and confidence are not the same thing.

[00:19:02]They're usually the opposite.

[00:19:06]Someone that obsessed with their image, that desperate for control in a relationship, that explosive when things don't go their way, that's not someone operating from a position of strength. And I think the documentary pointed it that way and had a bunch of people who don't understand psychology or the human brain or how we function in any sort of mature way expressing their opinions.

[00:19:35]A lot of people thought, "Oh, well, she's she's so strong. She's confi-" I think she's the opposite.

[00:19:42]She's someone who's terrified. She's terrified of being loved, terrified of being irrelevant, terrified that without the relationship, without the followers, without the constant validation, there's nothing underneath and there probably isn't much underneath, quite honestly.

[00:19:56]And when Dominic sent that text on July 2nd, when he told her he didn't think they should be together anymore, that wasn't just a breakup for someone like Mackenzie, that was an identity collapse. But again, it happened a month before, so I don't know how much it actually plays into this event.

[00:20:14]Everything she built her sense of self around, she was concerned it was at some point going to walk out the door and she could have none of it. So, yes, you can see a world where she snapped, where the rage and the desperation and the fear of abandonment converged into a single catastrophic act. You can look at the surveillance footage and see a deliberate turn, a sustained acceleration and a girl who decided that if she couldn't have Dominic, nobody could. But again, that's the prosecution story. This email back and forth of their relationship problems was one of many.

[00:20:52]And the one they're pointing to happened a month prior.

[00:20:59]So, why in her mind she's suddenly going back to that one communication despite the thousands in between?

[00:21:08]That's the one she's obsessing on it 5:00 something in the morning and driving into a wall. Is it?

[00:21:13]Or or If if the motivation was the relationship, I'm going to guess there might have been something else going on but other than that that text exchange from a month ago.

[00:21:27]But people like a story and the judge certainly did too.

[00:21:32]The prosecution story was that rageful, revengeful, fearing everything's going to slip apart from her.

[00:21:41]And there's that argument with the boyfriend about I mean, okay.

[00:21:45]Judge believed it. She called McKenzie's actions controlled, methodical, deliberate, intentional, and purposeful.

[00:21:51]She said the mission was death.

[00:21:55]But you can also see another world, a world where a 17-year-old was emotionally shattered, who had THC in her system, had been fighting with her boyfriend for weeks, who was driving at 5:30 in the morning after being up all night, a world where that girl made a catastrophically reckless decision in a moment of rage or despair that spiraled beyond anything she could recover from.

[00:22:16]Not premeditation, not a mission, just a human being at the worst possible intersection of impulse and consequence at the age of 17. And you can see a third world, the one the defense raised but never fully proved, where a girl diagnosed with POTS, a condition that causes fainting and sudden drops in blood pressure, blacked out behind the wheel.

[00:22:41]Third world is where this case truly falls apart.

[00:22:47]And not in the way either side wants it to. McKenzie's mother testified at trial that her daughter had been diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome in 2017. That's POTS. The defense mentioned it, but they never brought in a medical expert. There were no records, no testimony connecting the condition to the crash. That's not McKenzie's failure, that's her lawyers.

[00:23:13]After the conviction, a neurologist named Dr. Kamal Chamali, a professor of neurology in Cleveland, examined her medical records and concluded that the evidence was consistent with McKenzie having had a medical episode to what he called a reasonable degree of scientific and medical certainty. He pointed her lack of head trauma despite the violence of the impact, her total memory loss, her low blood blood oxygen levels, her elevated lactate, all consistent, he said, with a seizure episode and loss of consciousness.

[00:23:48]That opinion was never heard by the court.

[00:23:51]Not because it was evaluated and rejected.

[00:23:54]Not because another expert countered it.

[00:23:59]It was never heard because the post-conviction relief petition was filed one day late.

[00:24:04]One single day past Ohio's 365-day statutory deadline.

[00:24:12]The trial court said it lacked jurisdiction to even consider the merits.

[00:24:18]I got to say this, though. You got 365 [ __ ] days and you [ __ ] it up by a day?

[00:24:26]Well, when you watch Mom and Dad in the doc, you might know why.

[00:24:33]You might.

[00:24:35]And also, put those folks into consideration here when you go, "Hmm, I wonder why McKenzie's the way she is."

[00:24:43]>> [laughter] >> The Eighth District Court of Appeals upheld it. The Ohio Supreme Court declined to take it up. So, the one piece of evidence that might have complicated the conviction, the one expert who might have given a judge reason to reconsider was shut out on a technicality, but we do have rules for a reason. And I'm sorry, 300 some days to file it and you still screw it up.

[00:25:12]A calendar killed the argument before anyone could weigh it. Again, is that her fault?

[00:25:18]No, but it does take a village, right?

[00:25:22]And [laughter] let's talk about the trial itself. There was no jury. This was a bench trial. One judge, dancing Judge Nancy Margaret Russo, heard all of the evidence, rendered the verdict, and imposed the sentence. The same judge who later denied the post-conviction petition on procedural grounds. One person looked at that surveillance footage and decided she could see premeditation in it. One person heard about the Potts defense and decided it wasn't persuasive without expert testimony. One person called Mackenzie Shirilla hell on wheels and said the mission was death and a case this polarizing the evidence, this ambiguous, with a defendant this young, one mind made the call.

[00:26:05]No deliberation room, no 12 people wrestling with reasonable doubt, just one person saying, "Here's what happened. Here's the consequences."

[00:26:14]The documentary does something that that I think a lot of true crime content does, and it does it subtly enough that you might not even have noticed. It lets every person in this story tell themselves the version of the truth that helps them survive it. You'll notice that throughout this doc. Everybody's repeating their own version of reality to themselves over and over and over, and digging deeper into it, and then asking Mackenzie to basically repeat their version of it, and they're so upset that she won't because she's saying her version of it.

[00:26:49]So, what version is it? And what version will you ever be happy with? The one where she just completely agrees with yours?

[00:26:57]Is that how we get to the truth when someone finally agrees on something that we really can't solidly take a look at and get to?

[00:27:06]It's not like she's It's not like there is a solid piece of evidence here where she's literally writing down or texting, "I am about to go and run into a brick wall with these people."

[00:27:24]And we have the text and we're going, "See, you texted this. You said you're going to go run into a brick wall."

[00:27:31]Right now, right before you did this and you can't admit you did that. That doesn't That's not part of the story.

[00:27:36]That didn't happen.

[00:27:41]Instead, everybody wants to say they know what was going on in this girl's mind in that morning at that moment.

[00:27:49]And I get it. I If I were a parent who lost a child, I would probably be doing the same thing.

[00:27:57]I'd probably be finding ways of sneaking into the prison and poisoning her oatmeal.

[00:28:04]If I had lost a child, out of sheer revenge.

[00:28:14]And I'm not saying that'd be the right move to make.

[00:28:19]But I I I couldn't contemplate what these parents are going through. So, I'm not trying to fault them in any way, either, for having their opinions and having their very strong feelings on on McKenzie, without a doubt.

[00:28:34]I I don't know that I would have the grace to see it any other way. At least not yet.

[00:28:45]The families need McKenzie to be a monster, and I don't say that with any criticism. I say it with absolute understanding.

[00:28:51]Because if she's not a monster, if this wasn't premeditated, if it was reckless or medical or some horrible convergence of bad decisions at the worst possible moment, then there's no villain.

[00:29:03]There's just chaos.

[00:29:06]There's just a terrible thing that happened for no satisfying reason and that is unbearable when you're burying your child.

[00:29:15]I had to turn this thing off a couple times cuz it was like it was too much to watch.

[00:29:22]The The idea, especially especially if you have children of of watching other people go through the grief of losing their child is [ __ ] horrible.

[00:29:33]I I can't I hate documentaries and hearing stories about where this happens.

[00:29:40]Because you put yourself in other people's shoes if you're an empathetic person and it's one of the worst it it's it's just such a I can only take having a conversation like that it when it's about someone else's horrific situation for so long because it just weighs. It weighs so damn much.

[00:30:07]And that's just talking about it. I can't imagine being them. One of the fathers in the documentary says something that really did stick with me.

[00:30:14]He says he needs the truth so he can grieve properly and I hear that. I feel that.

[00:30:21]But what if the truth isn't the version he needs it to be?

[00:30:24]What if the truth is messier and uglier and less satisfying than a clear villain and a clear motive and a clear sentence?

[00:30:36]That doesn't diminish his grief. It doesn't make Dominic or Davian any less gone. It doesn't mean McKenzie deserves sympathy or freedom, but grief doesn't get to rewrite evidence. Pain doesn't get to fill in the gaps that the facts leave open and the facts in this case leave gaps that nobody wants to acknowledge because acknowledging them means sitting with uncertainty and uncertainty is the one thing grieving families cannot afford.

[00:31:00]McKenzie says she doesn't remember. She said it at the hospital. She said it through her attorneys. She said it in the documentary speaking on camera for the first time. Maybe she doesn't. Maybe it's self-protection. Maybe it's both.

[00:31:12]We don't know.

[00:31:13]And that's the point. We don't know.

[00:31:16]The prosecution presented a compelling narrative built on real evidence, the footage, the texts, the prior threat, the black box data, but a narrative isn't proof of intent.

[00:31:27]A narrative is a story you build around evidence to make it point in one direction. The defense presented an alternative that was never fully tested, a medical condition, an expert opinion, a legal filing that arrived 24 hours too late. Neither side gave us the full picture because neither side could.

[00:31:48]The full picture would require knowing what was happening inside McKenzie Shrilla's head at 5:30 in the morning on July 31st of 2022.

[00:31:56]And nobody knows that. Not the prosecutor, not the judge, not her parents, apparently not even her.

[00:32:04]Let me leave you with this. I I want to talk about Davey and Flanagan because in all the noise about McKenzie and Dominic's relationship, about the texts, about the threats, the surveillance footage, Davey and I get lost. He was 19.

[00:32:18]He was adopted with his two younger sisters when he was eight. He was a football player and a good one. He whose NFL dreams ended when he tore his ACL and UCL. After the injuries, he drifted into the friend group. He was in the backseat that morning because he was getting a ride home.

[00:32:37]He had no stake in the relationship between McKenzie and Dominic. He had no part in the fighting, the threats, the dysfunction.

[00:32:43]He was just there.

[00:32:45]His family started a memorial barber school scholarship in his name because before everything went wrong, that's what he wanted to do, cut hair.

[00:32:54]Whatever the truth is about what happened that morning, whatever it was, murder or recklessness or a medical event or something none of us have an imagination to consider.

[00:33:04]Davion Flanagan was an innocent passenger and his family has to live with the same unanswered questions as everyone else except they have even less reason to accept any version of events that tries to make sense of how their son ended up dead in the back of someone else's car.

[00:33:21]McKenzie Shirilla now is about 21 years old as of this recording. She's serving 15 years to life at the Ohio Reformatory for women. Her first parole hearing is scheduled for September of 2037. She'll be 33. If the sentence is for reckless behavior that killed two people, behavior born of volatility and immaturity and terrible judgment, then maybe it's not unjust.

[00:33:45]If it's for premeditated murder, for a crime that requires proof of intent beyond a reasonable doubt, then the question is whether the evidence actually clears that bar or whether we just need it to.

[00:33:56]Because the distance between she did something catastrophically reckless that killed two people and she executed a mission of death is enormous.

[00:34:09]And the evidence in this case lives somewhere in that gap.

[00:34:12]Not on the side of it, somewhere in the middle.

[00:34:16]Where nobody's comfortable and nobody gets the answer they want.

[00:34:23]Is it possible that everyone in the story, the families, the prosecutor, the judge, McKenzie herself is telling themselves the version of the truth they need to survive.

[00:34:34]And if they are, what does that leave?

[00:34:37]Or where does that leave justice?

[00:34:40]I don't know.

[00:34:41]I genuinely don't.

[00:34:43]And I think anyone who tells you they do know with certainty, with confidence, with no room for doubt is telling you more about what they need to believe than what the evidence actually shows.

[00:34:56]Your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. I would love to get your input.

[00:35:04]We're going to talk more about the case this next week with Shavon Scott, psychotherapist and author. So, don't miss that. We're going to get it breakdown from a uh psychotherapist standpoint. It's going to be fascinating. Press subscribe so you don't miss it. We'll continue our conversation in the comments. Until then, I'm Tony Bruski. We'll talk again real soon.

[00:35:22]Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now [music] and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Bruski and the Hidden Killers podcast.