Mackenzie Shirilla’s father insists the ‘Hell on Wheels’ killer is innocent
Mackenzie Shirilla’s father says there’s no way the former teen killed her boyfriend and another person on purpose when she drove her car into a brick wall at more than 100 miles per hour while the two were trapped inside, RadarOnline.com reports.
Steve Shirilla insists his daughter is innocent of murder, adding that if she wanted Dominic Russo dead, she could have killed her in several other ways.
Mackenzie was 17 when she killed her 21-year-old boyfriend Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan, 19. in the horrific crash that occurred on July 31, 2022.
She is currently serving two consecutive sentences of 15 years to life after being convicted in August 2023 of murder, aggravated vehicular homicide and other charges, but has long maintained that she had a medical emergency behind the wheel of her Toyota Camry and drove it straight into the building.
And her father believes her.
“She was 17. She’s a stupid kid. She didn’t do it on purpose,” Steve said on the podcast True crime this week. “I asked her, ‘Did you do this on purpose?’ And that’s her [said]’No.'”
Steve insisted that even if she was mad at Russo, there was no way she would punish their mutual friend Flanagan as well.
“I would think that if my daughter was that angry, that mad at that boy to want to kill him like that, Davion would never have been in the car,” Steve added. “That makes no sense.”
Besides, if Mackenzie really wanted to kill her boyfriend, Steve revealed that all she would have had to do was grab one of the many guns he had lying around his house.
“If she did that to Dom, there would be guns all over that boy’s house,” Steve explained. “If she killed him, that would make more sense to me.”
Mackenzie’s father does not deny his daughter played a role in the deaths of her friends, but says the murder charge was unfounded.
‘Something happened in that car. No one will ever know. She is innocent of the charges they brought against her,” he said. “[It] should have been homicide by juvenile vehicle, two counts, and we would have gone from there.
Prosecutors argued that the accident was a botched murder-suicide attempt, pointing to Mackenzie’s fractured relationship with Russo, including threatening text messages sent just weeks before the accident in which she eerily predicted she would die in a car.
Mackenzie and Russo had been feuding for months beforehand, and Russo had recently sent her a scathing text message calling for a breakup.
The bickering apparently continued, culminating in a text exchange in which both lovers accused the other of “trying to end” their lives.
“Now I have to look forward to you ending my life every time we fight like how am I supposed to not be scared,” Shirilla texted Russo on July 17.
It’s not clear exactly what sparked this particular argument, but Russo fired back, “Kenzie (you) f–king tripping is all I’m saying,” before adding, “(You) threaten to end my life all the time.”
Shirilla texted back a creepy hint about what was about to happen, but in this case, she accused Russo of planning to do the damage.
“All I care about is you trying to end my life and putting it in your hand on the steering wheel and trying to end it,” Shirilla screamed, then followed up with, “Nobody does that to someone they love.”
In the early morning hours of July 31, Shirilla drove her car into a building in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, killing her passengers. When first responders arrived on the scene, they found the car split in half, with Shirilla wedged between the driver’s seat and the door. Russo and Flanagan were dead on arrival.
“This was not reckless driving, this was murder,” a judge said as she handed down her sentence in 2023. “She had a mission, and she carried it out with precision. The decision was death.”
