The Crash: Was Mackenzie Shirilla's Conviction Built on Evidence or Assumptions?

**Tony Brueski** (0:02)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
Well, it seems to be the thing everybody's talking about right now. The Crash on Netflix. Mackenzie Shirilla was 17 years old when she drove a Toyota Camry into a brick building in Strongsville, Ohio, at close to 100 miles an hour, killing her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and their friend at the time, Davion Flanagan. She was convicted of four counts of murder in a bench trial. No jury. The prosecution leaned heavily on who Mackenzie was. The threatening text, the TikTok persona, the prior incident where she reportedly told Dominic she'd crashed the car during a fight. A judge called her hell on wheels and said her mission was death. We're going to go through what's going on in this case. This part is about whether her documented behavior actually points to someone capable of premeditated murder or whether being a volatile, controlling teenager got treated as evidence of something far worse. We certainly welcome your questions, your comments in those sections. Substack YouTube, wherever you're listening or watching, be sure to drop them. We'll try to work some of them in as we have the conversation. Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. As always, my co-host with me, we've watched this now over the weekend. I've watched it twice now.
What's... Before we get into the questions here, we've started breaking all this down.
In a succinct couple sentences, what was your reaction to watching The Crash and just what you saw on The Crash, not the outside context or outside information, because there's a lot of people saying, well, that's not really painting the full picture. And it's not, but on the doc.

**Robin Dreeke** (1:59)
Yeah, and welcome to my camper from the road as always. So if I go blinky on you, you know it's my starlink not working as good.

**Tony Brueski** (2:06)
If you're not going on summer vacation this year, Robin will take you on his.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:12)
Although I'm always working with HiddenKillers.
So it's a good day. And thank you Tony for trying to keep me within a couple of sentences.
So it was interesting because I thought there was good storytelling in the documentary because I kept getting yanked back and forth multiple times I thought. And because they made it a very compelling story, they made her a compelling character, they made all the people very compelling. And then I got pulled, I could tell you by the end of it, I'm split. I became very split on it because I could see the ruling. I could understand that. But at the same time, it's not what they're saying. I'm not seeing exactly, I'm going to use the word exactly what they're saying she is. Just because there's behaviors, there's things that she did and her parents did throughout that said it's not exactly a quite a specific fit for a homicidal murderer.

**Tony Brueski** (3:10)
Yeah, I agree and I think we'll kind of get through both of our thoughts on all this because there's so many pieces to this whole damn thing.
Let's start with one of the big things that is being pointed out. That's a lot of her text messages. She had texted Dominic, my way or the highway, watch your back, your house, your car, your life. And this is something that she texted him. I believe she was 16 or 17 at the time. Honestly, it doesn't really make a huge difference. There were strings of texts, their volatile relationship going back and forth for about four years.
When taken out of the context of all of that, and I'm not saying it's out of context as a whole, but when you just pull that out, well, that looks kind of scary. It also looks like the ramblings of a rabid 16, 17-year-old girl or boy who would just text a bunch of shit and shoot it off and not really think about the consequences to what those threats actually mean if you were a grown-ass adult saying them to someone else. Another thing they point to is texts, or two weeks before the crash, a friend heard Mackenzie saying, I'll crash this car right now when they were having a fight on I-71. Maybe that's almost as separately. Let's stick with the text. The text message themselves, her volatility towards her boyfriend, did that read to you as anything other than a 16, 17-year-old arguing with her boyfriend?

**Robin Dreeke** (4:49)
Yeah, it did actually.
And boy, we love making excuses though, not you and me, Tony, necessarily, but society in general that, oh, they're 16-year-olds, they're young, this is just, you know, typical rage moments, you know, language I use, maybe-ish. I'm not gonna give it a complete pass because, you know, I was a pretty high-strung, you know, emotional guy growing up too, but I never said anything like that. And the people I hung out with never said things like that either. So I'm not saying it's excusable or not excusable. It's a data point. And this is the data point it gave me, because as I'm trying to figure out her intent, I actually went back to something, and this is where the leakage starts coming in from these text messages, and then we'll get into the car stuff as well.