We have a legal update on Mackenzie Shirilla, the 21-year-old would-be influencer who is serving two concurrent 15 years to life sentences for killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan in a 2022 car accident, detailed in the Netflix documentary The Crash. About a month ago, Mackenzie’s lawyers filed a third appeal, hoping the Ohio Supreme Court would take her case. (True story: her second appeal was thrown out on a technicality. It was supposed to be filed within 365 days from a specified date… and her lawyers forgot to account for it being a Leap Year. Words fail.) Well, the court has officially responded and the Chief Justice said, to put it in the Pig Latin/Ubbi Dubbi language Mackenzie frequently uses: Dubenubied.
Mackenzie Shirilla will remain in prison for the murder of her boyfriend Dominic Russo and friend Davion Flanagan.
The 21-year-old, whose involvement in a deadly 2022 car crash was documented in Netflix’s The Crash, was an appeal by the Supreme Court of Ohio, according to legal documents obtained by E! News.
Shirilla filed a notice of appeal earlier this year, with her legal team saying her case “presents substantial constitutional questions and matters of great public and great general interest” after her post-conviciton relief petition was rejected due to being filed one day late from her deadline.
In response, prosecutors argued in a May filing that Shirilla’s appeal “fails to present an issue of public or great general interest,” saying her claim “concerns only the untimely filing of a post-conviction petition due to the mistake of counsel.”
Ultimately, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio Sharon L. Kennedy refused to review Shirilla’s case, writing in a June 23 decision that she “declines to accept jurisdiction of the appeal.”
E! News has reached out to Shirilla’s attorney for comment but hasn’t heard back.
Shirilla is currently serving two concurrent 15 years to life sentences for killing Russo, 20, and Flanagan, 19, on July 31, 2022, when the Toyota Camry she was driving smashed into a brick wall at over 100 mph.
During her trial, prosecutors alleged Shirilla “chose a course of death and destruction” by purposefully crashing the car. Meanwhile, the aspiring influencer maintained her innocence, saying she had no memory of what happened before the collision.
In her first interview from prison, Shirilla affirmed that she had “no intent whatsoever” on Russo, with whom she was in an on-and-off relationship, and their friend Flanagan.
“I was a driver of a tragedy,” she said in The Crash, “but I’m not a murderer.”
Shirilla added, “I try to wake up and be the best person I can be every day, stay out of trouble. There’s not a moment that doesn’t pass where I don’t think about them.”
Good. Mackenzie is exactly where she belongs. And who knows, maybe sometime before 2037, she’ll have grown up enough to have availed herself of some of the resources available to her at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. I looked them up before — back when we heard Mackenzie was complaining of being “bored” in prison — and they have several programs she could be doing for her own education and towards job training. Personally, I’d dive into the educational front to start with. She’s college-aged, so it would be a way to keep up with her peers from high school. It would also be an opportunity for her to learn what’s wrong with the sentence “There’s not a moment that doesn’t pass where I don’t think about them.” Sorry not sorry, I can’t stop the syntax snark.
Photos courtesy of Netflix and via Instagram