The monitor glowed in the dark studio, a single headline burning across the screen: “31 Chilling Mackenzie Shirilla Text Messages.” The host leaned forward, his voice low and deliberate.

“McKenzie Shirilla’s text messages after the deadly crash that left two young men dead shed a whole other light on this case,” he said. “So we’re going to break down the conversations that she had after this incident that would ultimately see her behind bars, and more details from a police report that gives us a better understanding of this investigation.”

He pulled up the first set of messages.

“I say text messages are sometimes such powerful evidence because once a message is sent, it can be very hard to argue that you didn’t send it or you didn’t mean what you wrote. And that is why I want to address right now the communications in the McKenzie Shirilla case.”

He summarized the case.

“We have been covering all aspects of the young woman who was found guilty by a judge in a bench trial back in 2023 of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide, one count of drug possession, and one count of possessing criminal tools. All in connection with the July 31st, 2022 car crash that killed her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanigan. Dominic was twenty, Davion was nineteen.”

He pulled up the crash details.

“The seventeen-year-old Shirilla at the time mashed down the accelerator, never tried to brake. This is according to investigative reports. Sailed over a curb, through a business sign, into a brick wall. Now, Shirilla has insisted that ever since she has no memory whatsoever of the crash or the minutes leading up to it, which we’ll get into, because she and her family have suggested that she has a diagnosis of POTS. It’s a medical condition that can cause dizziness or fainting. So they claim Shirilla must have blacked out, which is why she drove off the road.”

He pulled up the trial detail.

“Shirilla’s mother even testified at the bench trial that she’d seen her daughter exhibit symptoms of POTS, but the defense never called a medical examiner to testify that Shirilla actually has the condition. So that didn’t seem to convince the judge. By the way, there was no evidence of a car malfunction. There was no evidence of intoxication from drugs or alcohol.”

He pulled up the sentencing.

“Shirilla was arrested several months after the tragedy in November of 2022, and after her 2023 trial, she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole starting in 2037. But Shirilla and her family have continued to maintain that she’s innocent. And this includes in her first on-camera interview from behind bars in a new documentary on Netflix called ‘The Crash.’”

He played a quote from the documentary.

“I’m not a monster. I’m not saying I’m innocent. I was the driver of a tragedy, but I’m not a murderer.”

He pulled up the first set of text messages to Dominic’s mother.

“When you go to this phone records document, which is up on Law & Crime Plus, our app, we have a whole section for Mackenzie Shirilla and all the documents if you want to do a deep dive into the case. What you see, for example, are multiple attempts by McKenzie Shirilla to contact what appears to be members of the Russo family, particularly Dominic’s mother. So this is after the crash, again, before she was arrested in November of 2022.”

He read the messages.

“For example, in August, so this is just a short time after the crash, Shirilla writes, apparently in reference to Dom’s funeral, ‘I love you so much, Miss Russo. I’m sorry for being on FaceTime. Made you guys upset. I just needed to see if he looks so peaceful. And thank you guys for putting pictures of me. I’m so sorry, you guys. I wish I could be there to hug you. I love you all so much. And I’m so sorry.’”

He read another.

“‘I’m so sorry, Miss Russo. I love you all so much. I’m so sorry that this happened. I miss him so much. I wish I could be there for you guys. I will always be here for you, and when I’m out of the hospital, I can take care of you whenever you need.’”

He read the message about the coffin.

“‘And then she talks about what she wants to put in his coffin. I tried to ask Angelo, but would you be able to go in Dom’s room and go into his bedroom and on his back desk and grab some stuff to put in his coffin? I just wanted to be with him.’”

He pulled up the careful messages.

“And she seemed to be very aware that she needed to be careful and not cross any lines with this family because look at this message from August 9th: ‘Just let me know if you want me to stop bothering you. I will always be here when you’re ready to talk.’ And remember, she’s still in the hospital after the crash recovering.”

He read the September 23rd message.

“‘I don’t want to bother you, and I feel bad for asking. If you guys are doing something for Dom’s birthday and you don’t want me to come, are you going to go to the grave and maybe we can meet there or something? I’m sorry.’”

He pulled up the first hinge.

“McKenzie Shirilla sent message after message to Dominic’s mother. She said she loved them. She said she was sorry. She said she wanted to be part of their family. But nowhere in those messages did she say the one thing that might have made a difference: ‘I did this. It was my fault. I will spend the rest of my life making it right.’ Instead, she asked why everyone hated her. She was the victim in her own story. And the dead boys were just collateral damage.”

He pulled up the messages about hate.

“And a big theme is why do people hate her? ‘If you don’t hate me, I don’t understand why they all hate me.’”

He read the exchange about the house.

“‘I know I could help you if you want to, but I was just telling you I don’t understand why they hate me if you don’t hate me. I’m really stressed out about people moving my things or making it look different than it was when Dom lived there.’”

He paused.

“Because I think they had been living together.”

He continued.

“‘My top priority is just being able to go inside of that house and just be there for the day. It hurts that everybody but me is allowed in the house. It already hurts seeing all of his friends there at night spending time with you. But it hurts even worse seeing I’m the only one not allowed in his house that I spent the most time in.’”

He read the plea.

“‘I just don’t get why everybody has to hate me. It just makes me hate myself even more. I wish everybody would just not hate me. I really can’t tell if you hate me or not. I feel like if you didn’t hate me, you wouldn’t let me come over or be there for you, or you would tell everybody that they shouldn’t hate me. But I feel like you just don’t like me. And I wish you would just tell me so I could stop bugging you.’”

He read the mother’s response.

“‘This is all emotional. I can’t tell anyone to do anything. I don’t hate you. Gosh, I’m having a tough time with just not having my son.’”

He read Shirilla’s response.

“‘You can’t tell them to, but you could tell them that you don’t hate me. And it’s hard for me to. I’m also having a tough time. He was the love of my life, and I spent my last four years every day with him pretty much. I just don’t understand why I’m the only one not allowed inside of his house. I know he wouldn’t want this. I didn’t just lose Dom. I lost my whole other family, and that’s you guys.’”

He pulled up the messages about memory loss.

“Now, there were several times during the course of these communications where the conversation circles back to what exactly happened that night and that Shirilla claims she can’t remember. For example, Shirilla was asked, ‘What made you start speeding?’ Shirilla responds, ‘I don’t remember the accident. All I remember is turning on the street and then my vision fading into black. I wish I could remember it. Would make me feel a little bit better.’”

He read Christine Russo’s message.

“So this is a message from Christine Russo again, Dominic’s mother, to Shirilla. It says, ‘I would do anything to have you both with me like before. But you need—and you have to understand how one feels about this. Your driving killed my son, their brother, and their best friend. No one has any answers about why this accident occurred and why you drove directly into a building which resulted in two young men dying. It was not an ordinary car accident. If it was, we would not be having this conversation.’”

He read Shirilla’s response.

“‘I didn’t know you felt that way. I hope you would know I would never do this on purpose. I needed him more than anybody on this earth. He was my everything.’”

He read the mother’s response.

“‘I was explaining to you why it’s difficult for things to try to be normal, as they never will be. It still never answers what happened that night.’”

He read Shirilla’s response.

“‘I wish I could remember just as much as you want to know why. It kills me not being able to remember because if I could help, I would. I wasn’t asking for life to be normal. It’s never going to be the same for me either.’”

He pulled up the second hinge.

“Dominic’s mother asked for answers. Shirilla offered amnesia. The mother asked for accountability. Shirilla offered grief. The mother asked for justice. Shirilla offered herself as the third victim. But there were only two people in that car who didn’t walk away. And one of them was driving.”

He read another response.

“‘I did not do this on purpose. If I knew any of this would happen, I would have made sure it was me that died. I would think you would understand, but good to know that you think it’s all my fault. I do understand that nothing is ever going to be the same. We’re in the same boat. We both lost extremely important people to us.’”

He read another.

“‘Everybody’s life is hell. Everybody is broken over this. It’s not just you and Angelo. And I wish I could take that pain away from you guys and just make it so it’s only me. I try so hard to tell you guys that I would never do this on purpose, and I thought you would know that.’”

He read the plea to help.

“‘Could you please try to help me get people to see that I didn’t do this on purpose? It seriously hurts my soul that anyone thinks that, and I can’t sleep knowing that.’”

He read the message about being hypnotized.

“She’s asked, ‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ ‘I remember turning onto the street and then my vision fades to black. It really kills me not being able to remember anything. I promise you I would tell you. I’ve been asking my therapist why I don’t remember.’ And she said, ‘It’s because of trauma, but I’m going to try to go get hypnotized and make myself remember.’”

He pulled up the third hinge.

“She said she would get hypnotized to remember the crash. She never did. She said she would do anything to help the families. She never did. She said she wished it was her who died. But she’s the one who walked away. The dead don’t send text messages. The dead don’t ask for forgiveness. The dead don’t need to be hypnotized to remember what happened. They were there. They remember everything.”

He pulled up the messages about Dominic.

“And what’s interesting also is how much in these conversations she talks about how much she loves Dom. So Shirilla writes at one point, ‘Life is just going to be messed up. He was just someone that did something for all of us and made us all feel loved and protected in a special way. He had a really certain soul that was like no other. I’ve never met anybody that was like him, and he grew so much in our relationship. It just hurts. He was a mama’s boy. He would literally be there for you no matter what.’”

He read another.

“‘Our relationship was getting so real. Like, I felt like we were going to get married soon. And it’s just so messed up.’”

He pulled up the texts between Shirilla and Dominic before the crash.

“Now, speaking of text messages, the text messages between Shirilla and Dominic are included in investigative paperwork. And I just want to take a look. I want to focus on a conversation that happened just four weeks before Dom’s death. So this looks like he was trying to end things.”

He read Dominic’s message.

“‘Kenzie, you know I love you, but I don’t think we should be together at this point. There isn’t very much time on earth. You know, I’d like to think we could stop fighting, but it’s a breakup fight every week. Neither of us deserve that. I don’t want to fight all the time. I know you don’t either. Anyone who’s around anyone every day of the week is bound to fight. If we can’t separate for a little, then we’re only going to fight more. I don’t want you to think I’m abandoning you. I wish it could work, but I don’t think it’s going to at this point, especially with the threats. We should just break up so we can both find happiness somewhere else.’”

He paused.

“And that text was followed up by another one just a few hours later asking Shirilla if she wants to try to work things out.”

He pulled up the fourth hinge.

“‘There isn’t very much time on earth.’ Dominic wrote those words four weeks before he died. He didn’t know he was right. He didn’t know that the person he was texting would be the one to prove it. Sometimes the victims write their own warnings. And sometimes the killers ignore them all.”

He pulled up the July 17th incident.

“Now there’s another document, a police department document that lays out essentially the whole timeline of this investigation. It’s up on Law & Crime Plus, the app as well. And a part of that are these text messages between Shirilla and Christine Russo. Now we believe this again to be Dom’s mother, not his sister who shares the same name. But I’m going to read you these exchanges.”

He read the July 17th exchange.

“McKenzie writes, ‘Can you come get Dom? He just grabbed my steering wheel on the highway trying to spin out my car and hurt me.’ McKenzie writes, ‘I’m scared to drive because it’s raining, so I just need him to get picked up. If he doesn’t get out of my car, I’m calling my dad, so please tell him to get out.’”

He read Russo’s response.

“‘Hench is on his way. Calm down for now, please.’”

He read McKenzie’s response.

“‘TBH, I can’t calm down when he just tried to end my life.’”

He read another.

“‘I don’t feel safe. He’s also threatening to blackmail me to my mom. He’s not getting out. He also blocked me so I can’t go pick up any of my belongings at his house.’”

He read the eerie message.

“‘I almost hit the wall, and I could have died.’”

He paused.

“So eerily, very eerie considering what happened only a few weeks later.”

He pulled up the witness statements.

“But when police followed up with Hench, the friend who picked up Dom during that early July incident, Dom claimed it was Shirilla who threatened to crash the car. And that was relayed to police in an interview with him saying, quote, ‘I asked Russo about a text message exchange with McKenzie dated July 17th, 2022. At approximately 12:45 hours, McKenzie asked Russo to pick up Dominic from her car, which was stopped at the side of an unknown highway. McKenzie claimed Dominic had grabbed her steering wheel in an attempt to spin out the car and hurt her. Russo explained that McKenzie always blamed Dominic for whatever issues were going on between them. She further added that Dominic called her and calmly asked her to come pick him up because Kenzie is being crazy. She’s threatening to crash the car on the highway.’”

He pulled up the interviews with friends.

“Several other witnesses talked about Shirilla’s driving, including a friend Kelly who had been with Shirilla, Dom, and Davion at a party before the crash. When I asked her if she had ever been in the car with McKenzie as the driver, she said no. Kelly mentioned that her friend Tess had told her that McKenzie sucked at driving.”

He read Paul’s interview.

“And then there’s this interview with Paul Berlinghaus, the friend who’d hosted the get-together. ‘Next, I inquired whether Paul had ever been a passenger in McKenzie’s car while she drove. He said, ‘I’ve refused a ride from McKenzie.’ When asked why, he said, ‘Because she was a bad driver.’ He further explained that she got in fights while driving. Paul said he used to see McKenzie zipping through Pearl Road after school. Paul said he refused rides from McKenzie because he was not stupid and did not want to put himself in a situation he wouldn’t want to be in. Paul mentioned that Rosie, who was one of McKenzie’s passengers, told him, ‘Don’t go in the car with Kenzie. It’s not good.’”

He pulled up the Snapchat evidence.

“And it turns out that Shirilla’s Snapchat account was a treasure trove of information. The investigators compiled more than 130 videos or images that were related to Shirilla’s driving. I mean, the report states, for example, McKenzie is driving while simultaneously recording herself on Snapchat. A person in the driver’s seat recorded a Snapchat video of the vehicle traveling at ninety miles per hour. Multiple videos exist of McKenzie recording herself while driving without wearing the seatbelt over her shoulder, and others where the seatbelt is visible under her armpit. McKenzie records the speedometer of the vehicle she’s operating traveling at ninety-three miles per hour.”

He paused.

“So again, when you look at this in the context of what happened to her, what happened to Dominic, what happened to Davion, it’s just chilling to say the least, right?”

He pulled up the fifth hinge.

“She filmed herself driving ninety-three miles per hour while not wearing her seatbelt. She posted it for the world to see. She knew she was a dangerous driver. Her friends knew. Her boyfriend knew. The only person who didn’t seem to know was Shirilla herself. Or maybe she knew. Maybe she just didn’t care. Either way, two young men paid the price for her indifference.”

He pulled up the hospital behavior.

“And one of the aspects of the case that is getting a lot of attention is Shirilla’s behavior after the crash, appearing to essentially live her life in a way where the argument was it didn’t seem like she cared what happened. For example, here’s what a police narrative says about trying to speak with Shirilla in the hospital. This is along with her dad Steve and her mom Natalie. ‘The three of us returned to the room. McKenzie was conscious and alert.’”

He read the exchange.

“‘Explain to all three the details of the search warrant. The basic nature of the investigation. Steve asked about video surveillance from the crash itself. I also informed them that SPD will be downloading the data from the Toyota’s event data recorder pursuant to another search warrant. Natalie then inquired about the location of the Toyota. At some point, McKenzie interrupted and addressed her mom in a language that I did not understand. Her mother replied, ‘You can,’ indicating that she understood what McKenzie had said.’”

He read the key line.

“‘McKenzie then turned to me and stated, ‘Take my whole license away for ten years or something like that.’”

He paused.

“Again, the argument would be not appreciating what happened, right? The seriousness of what happened, the crime that she ultimately was convicted of.”

He pulled up the Instagram post.

“How about this? Apparently, one of Davion’s family members emailed the detective a screenshot of Shirilla’s Instagram, which was later shown during Shirilla’s sentencing hearing. And it says, quote, ‘This is a screenshot from her daughter Divine’s phone of comments on a social media post from Kenzie about her modeling career. This post is from later in the week after the accident while Kenzie was in the hospital. Divine believes that it was approximately two days after the accident. The post was commented on by both Kenzie and her mother talking about furthering her modeling career. We are extremely upset to see this post and felt it was very disrespectful to our family’s loss and to Davion and Dom. It is sickening that someone could be so self-absorbed after causing the death of two people and destroying any hopes of their future plans.’”

He pulled up the sixth hinge.

“Two days after she killed two people, McKenzie Shirilla was in a hospital bed discussing her modeling career with her mother. The bodies weren’t even cold. The families hadn’t even begun to grieve. But Kenzie had priorities. And those priorities did not include the two young men who would never have a future again.”

He pulled up the car data analysis.

“Now, when I read that report, I will tell you some of the most impactful legal aspects of this police report are about the actual car data. Was this an accident or was it not, right? So you go to the report. It says, quote, ‘Ohio State Highway Patrol Sergeant Ryan Fox emailed me his analysis of the EDR data. Prior to the Camry entering the intersection, a loud screeching sound can be heard from the business surveillance system camera that records the approach and crash of the Camry. This loud screeching is likely the result of a steering input of the driver and the inability of the tires and friction of the roadway to overcome the forward momentum of the vehicle. The vehicle’s tires are likely turned as requested by the steering input reported, but the vehicle is continuing more in its original forward trajectory. This likely indicates manipulation of the steering wheel immediately prior to entering the intersection.’”

He read the brake light analysis.

“‘The brake light that was illuminated mere fractions of a second prior to impact. The system will activate the rear brake lights to indicate the possible slowing of the vehicle to other motorists, even if the driver is not pressing on the brake pedal. The extreme driver input for the vehicle prior to the collision—the brake light activation is likely the result of the safety systems working to avoid the impact ahead or return the vehicle to a straight orientation for the direction of travel. This likely indicates that although the steering wheel was manipulated left and right, no braking was applied by the operator.’”

He paused.

“So there you go, some more things to think about in the Mackenzie Shirilla case as it’s back in the conversation. It’s back in the dialogue. We’re learning more information. We’ll stay on top of it here on Sidebar.”

The seventh and final hinge arrived as the data told the truth that Shirilla could not remember: “The car didn’t malfunction. The road didn’t fail. The tires didn’t blow. A seventeen-year-old girl put her foot on the accelerator and never took it off. She steered toward a wall. She didn’t brake. She didn’t swerve. She drove. And two young men died. The texts don’t lie. The data doesn’t lie. The only person still telling lies is the one who walked away. And she will have fifteen years in prison to think about what she did. The families will have forever.”

He reached for his water.

“That’s all we have for you right now. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. You can also check us out on NBC’s Peacock as well.”

He set the glass down.

“If you want to follow me on X or Instagram, my NewsNation show, ‘Jesse Weber Live,’ Monday through Friday, 11 p.m. Eastern. I’ll see you next time, everybody.”