The Crash: Is Mackenzie Shirilla a Calculated Killer or a Broken Teenager?

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Because it's all anybody's talking about right now, we'll keep talking about it too. Mackenzie Shirilla was 17 when she drove a Toyota Camry into a brick building in Strongville, Ohio, at close to 100 miles an hour, killing her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and their friend Davion Flanagan. The prosecution painted a controlling, image-obsessed young woman, the threatening text, the Tik-Tok persona, the volatility, judge called her hell on wheels. But the loudest, most controlling behavior often comes from the most fragile of places. There's a lot of opinions out there online right now about Mackenzie Shirilla, about her family, about the judge, about everything, about everything involved in this case. And a lot of it making a lot of sense, a lot of it grounded in reality. Some of it not. Some of it not really understanding human behavior and who people are and who they continue to be and how sometimes a triggering event or a big event just doesn't really change a whole lot about somebody. Joining us to discuss and help us break down the Mackenzie Shirilla, The Crash story, Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author. As always, thank you for being here and welcome. It's just you and me today. Robin is out.
I've been really looking forward to diving into this because there's so many opinions that are out there on Mackenzie Shirilla.
Before we start getting into questions and thoughts and diving into different areas of this, the first area I want to get into is really the psychology of her herself before we get into the relational ties that she has to everyone. What was your thoughts? You watched the documentary twice, just like I did. You watched it one time, you watched it a second time. What was your thoughts the first time you watched it and the second time? Maybe it was the same. You tell me.

**Shavaun Scott** (2:13)
Yeah, it was the same. I just wanted to go back the second. First, I get my emotional gut reaction.
And then I wanted to go back and take specific notes about the clinical things. This would have been a wonderful documentary if I were still training new therapists and training interns, which I used to do. I would assign this as homework because it's a very rich story, meaning there's so much information there that I think is really important and relevant. But yeah, my just initial take, which I still believe we've got an emotionally dysregulated teenager with Cluster B traits, who acted impulsively in a moment of rage. I mean, basically a tantrum, which goes with the kind of traits that I'll be talking about.

**Tony Brueski** (3:02)
Let me ask you this, if you were assigning this as homework, what would you be wanting your students to be taking out of it?

**Shavaun Scott** (3:11)
Family dynamics, because when you're doing therapy, you've always got to look at family dynamics.
Personality qualities, how they cluster and what they mean. And then of course with therapists, how the heck do you work with this? I think it's a really good teaching opportunity for that.

**Tony Brueski** (3:31)
Her whole public identity was really built around image. We saw that very clearly in this. It was someone who grew up with this as her sidekick from a very young age. And seemingly, she got her validation from it through the lens of that camera. Whether looking at herself and feeling good about herself, or the comments she would get from other people. It was a Tik-Tok persona. The way that she presented herself, the control.
When you got somebody that has that level of self-obsession, and there's a lot about, you know, you look at people today, you look at young people today, you'd be hard pressed to find people who don't have a social media profile with probably what we would have classified as maybe 20 years ago, a maybe an unhealthy level of self-interest, the sheer amount of images that people take of themselves posing in different ways, shapes or forms. But there's people that take that and they still go even further to an even more extreme level. When you're looking at Mackenzie Shirilla, when you're looking at that level of self-obsession that she seemed to present, what does it tell you about her actual self-esteem, the person behind the mask on Tik-Tok?

**Shavaun Scott** (4:52)
You know, there's a lot of good evidence that narcissism is increasing since social media, the use smartphones, the use of so much technology by kids. And we're seeing more and more narcissistic traits. Does that mean that they've got a full narcissistic personality disorder? It doesn't mean that. But it means that their identity is being filtered through what do people think of me? How do they view me? And so it disrupts the normal development of a sense of self. And that's definitely what I saw going on with her, is there's nothing under there. There's really nothing under there.