The Ohio teenager who will be sentenced Monday after she was convicted of intentionally crashing her car at 100 mph had an increasingly toxic relationship with her boyfriend, who died in the wreck, prosecutors and family members said.
Mackenzie Shirilla, 19, was found guilty of 12 counts last Monday, including four counts of murder, in the July 2022 crash in Strongsville, Ohio, which killed her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, 20, and his friend Davion Flanagan, 19.
Prosecutors argued at the four-day trial that the couple fought and that Shirilla made violent threats — including once threatening to crash her car with Russo in it, which she ultimately deliberately did to end their tumultuous relationship.
“We put plenty of that sort of evidence in front of the judge,” Tim Troup of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office told NBC affiliate WKYC of Cleveland after the verdict. “There is no doubt that this happened because of the relationship with Dominic, and the defendant’s intent was clearly to end that, and she took everybody that was in the car with her.”
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During the trial, security video of the crash played in the courtroom — showing her vehicle zoom on a street and crash with a roar into a building, with no signs of slowing down.
