Strongsville woman gets life sentences for killing boyfriend, friend in 100-mph crash
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 19-year-old Strongsville woman was sentenced to life in prison Monday for crashing her car at 100 mph into a building and killing her boyfriend and their friend.
Mackenzie Shirilla was two days shy of her 18th birthday last July when she floored her Toyota Camry’s accelerator and slammed it into a brick warehouse. Dominic Russo, 20, and Davion Flanagan, 19, died.
Now, she must spend the next 15 years in prison before she can ask the state parole board to release her.
Shirilla made several social media posts grieving Russo’s death after the crash, and she asked one of Russo’s relatives if family members could put photographs of the couple inside Russo’s casket when they buried his body.
She apologized to the families of Flanagan and Russo in court, but she maintained on Monday that she did not mean to kill them.
“I hope one day you can see I would never let this happen or do it on purpose,” Shirilla said to the families. “We were all friends, and Dom was my soul mate.”
But prosecutors displayed in court on Monday social media posts that Shirilla made in the months after the deaths in which she was dancing to music and dressed up for Halloween with friends at Ohio University. It was an effort to show she had “a shocking lack of remorse,” Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim Troup said.
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy Margaret Russo imposed the sentence one week after she called Shirilla “hell on wheels”[1] in delivering her verdict.
The judge found Shirilla guilty Aug. 14 of 12 counts, including multiple counts of murder, felonious assault and aggravated vehicular homicide. The murder convictions each carried an automatic sentence of life in prison with no chance at parole for 15 years. The judge ordered the sentences to be served at the same time and not consecutively, which would have required Shirilla to spend at least 30 years in prison.
“I understand the pain in this room wants me to impose the harshest sentence,” Russo, the judge, said. “I don’t believe Mackenzie will be out in 15 years.”
Russo also suspended Shirilla’s driver’s license for life.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said after the hearing that he hoped Shirilla would come out of prison as a better person.
“She has got a long life ahead of her,” O’Malley said. “God only knows when she’ll get out.”
Shirilla and her attorney, James McDonnell, chose to have the judge render a verdict instead of a jury.
The crash[2] happened about 5:30 a.m. July 31, 2022, at a 250,000-square-foot building in Strongsville’s Progress Drive Business Park. Shirilla turned slowly onto Alameda Drive from Pearl Road and then floored her 2018 Toyota Camry down the three-quarter-mile street until it reached 100 mph[3], according to surveillance video and data from the car’s computer system.
The steering wheel jerked to the right, then to the left, and the airbags deployed seconds before the car jumped the curb and slammed into the business.
A passerby spotted the crash nearly 45 minutes later and called police, who found Dominic Russo and Flanagan dead. Shirilla was trapped in the driver’s seat with one of her fuzzy Prada slippers stuck to the accelerator, and firefighters pried her out.
Shirilla, Russo and Flanagan had spent the night at a friend’s house, where they smoked marijuana, friends testified. Strongsville police and Cuyahoga County prosecutors did not charge her with driving under the influence. They, instead, chose to pursue murder charges.
Flanagan was adopted with his siblings as a young boy. His mother, Jaime Flanagan, said that her son went out of his way to make people feel special, and he made friends with those others would shun. He also wanted to be go to barber school and open his own shop.
“He gave the world what he wanted in his own life and that was love,” the mother said.
Flanagan’s younger sister, Davyne, read from a prepared statement in which she asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence because Shirilla “always takes the easy way out.”
Russo produced music and was an avid reader, and he recently told his family members that he was considering joining the military.
“Mackenzie Shirilla had a choice,” Dominic Russo’s mother, Christine, said. “Dom and Davion did not.”
But the mother said she still didn’t know why Shirilla killed her son.
Prosecutors argued at trial that Shirilla, who had lived with Russo’s family for several months leading up the crash, wrecked her car on purpose to kill Russo after their relationship had deteriorated.
McDonnell conceded that Shirilla was driving recklessly and was guilty of aggravated vehicular homicide. But he argued there wasn’t enough evidence that Shirilla meant to kill the two men. He called witnesses who said the couple had recently talked about getting married and that Shirilla had been diagnosed with a medical condition that caused her to pass out occasionally in an effort to sow doubt in the judge’s mind.
McDonnell also argued that Shirilla likely would have wanted to commit suicide if she had purposely drove a car that fast into a brick wall, but there was no evidence that Shirilla had been suicidal in before the crash.
Ultimately, the judge said that it didn’t matter.
“There’s only one person responsible or all of the pain in this room, and that person is you, Mackenzie,” Russo said.
References
- ^ “hell on wheels” (www.cleveland.com)
- ^ The crash (www.cleveland.com)
- ^ reached 100 mph (www.cleveland.com)