The father of Mackenzie Shirilla, infamously dubbed the “Hell on Wheels” killer, has come forward to defend his daughter against accusations that she intentionally caused a fatal car crash in 2022. In an interview on the podcast “True Crime This Week,” Steve Shirilla contended that if Mackenzie had genuinely wanted to kill her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, she could have used one of his firearms instead of resorting to a vehicular tragedy.
Steve expressed that his daughter feels deep remorse for the deaths of 21-year-old Russo and his friend, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan, who was tragically caught up in the incident. He emphasized that Mackenzie never intended for the crash to result in their deaths, according to a report by TMZ.
These remarks come amid revelations that Mackenzie and her mother were once overheard laughing about the media frenzy surrounding the case. They had even considered penning a book about the ordeal and envisioned a future where Mackenzie might mingle with Hollywood elites.
In the podcast conversation with host James Renner, Steve painted a picture of his daughter as a naive teenager. “She was 17. She’s a dumb kid. She didn’t do it on purpose,” he insisted. Steve shared that he directly questioned Mackenzie about her intentions, and she consistently denied any deliberate harm.
Steve further argued that if Mackenzie had truly harbored such animosity towards Russo, she wouldn’t have endangered Flanagan by having him in the car. “It makes no sense,” he concluded, suggesting that the events leading to the crash were not premeditated.
“And I would think if my daughter was that mad, that mad at that boy to want to kill him that way, Davion would have never been in the car [also]. … That makes no sense,” Steve argued.
Steve claimed that if Mackenzie really wanted to kill her boyfriend, she could have just used one of the many guns the young man kept at home.
“If she was going to do that to Dom, there were guns all over that kid’s house. … If she was going to kill him, that would make more sense to me,” Steve said.
Steve said Mackenzie, now 21, who had been dating Dominic for several years before the fatal wreck, had a “shrine to him” in her bedroom and “cried herself to sleep every night” after his death.
“If you would have heard her when she found out that Dom died, if you would have heard the sound that came out of her, it would have crushed you,” Steve said.
Chilling new text messages released by law enforcement show that Russo was trying to break up with Mackenzie a month before she intentionally floored her Toyota Camry into a brick wall at 100 mph, killing both Russo and Flanagan.
“I’m gonna kill someone,” “I j (sic) want to bang my head on the wall till I’m dead” and, “I f—king hate myself… Now I’m at your f—king house breaking down on your floor,” Mackenzie eerily wrote to Russo.
Prosecutors argued throughout Mackenzie’s 2023 trial that she wanted to murder Russo. She was ultimately found guilty of vehicular homicide.
“This was not reckless driving — this was murder,” Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Nancy Margaret Russo said in court after the killer’s conviction. “She had a mission, and she executed it with precision. The decision was death.”
Mackenzie’s father disputed that narrative completely during the podcast.
“Something happened in that car. No one’s ever going to know. She’s innocent of the charges they put upon her,” he said.
“[It] should have been juvenile vehicular homicide, two counts, and we would have went from there.”
Mackenzie’s case has been in the spotlight recently since the documentary “The Crash” was released on Netflix earlier this month — where she appeared on-screen from inside the Ohio Reformatory for Women prison.
She is currently serving two concurrent sentences of 15 years to life.
