Mackenzie Shirilla is currently serving a life sentence in Ohio after driving a car at 160kph into a building in 2022, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his friend Davion Flanagan. Now 21, Shirilla remains at the centre of one of the internet age’s most unsettling true-crime cases – one that Netflix’s new documentary The Crash revisits with disturbing detail.
The documentary reconstructs the night Shirilla, then 17, crashed her Toyota Camry into a commercial building in Strongsville, Ohio, killing Russo, 20, and Flanagan, 19. What initially appears to be a horrific accident quickly turns into something far darker once investigators began examining her phone, social media activity and relationship with Russo.
At the heart of the trial was intent. Prosecutors argued Shirilla deliberately accelerated into the wall after Russo attempted to end their volatile relationship.
During the 2023 bench trial, they presented GPS data suggesting she had visited the industrial area before the crash, alongside evidence that there were no skid marks or signs of braking. The prosecution also pointed to messages and online behaviour that they argued reflected emotional instability and manipulation. Judge Nancy Russo ultimately convicted Shirilla of murder and aggravated vehicular homicide, later describing her as “literal hell on wheels”.
The documentary methodically revisits those details, but what makes The Crash compelling is not whether it changes your mind about the verdict. It probably will not. Instead, the film becomes something more uncomfortable: a portrait of what criminal justice looks like in the age of oversharing.
For Gen Z, nearly every emotion now exists online. Arguments become text chains. Heartbreak becomes TikToks. Grief becomes Instagram captions. The documentary repeatedly returns to Shirilla’s social media activity after the crash, including videos filmed from her hospital bed and posts that prosecutors argued appeared performative or emotionally detached. Even images taken at a Halloween party in the weeks following the tragic incident are presented. Viewed through the lens of a courtroom, much of it looks devastatingly incriminating.
Perhaps that is why the judge’s decision feels, at times, almost inevitable.
The Crash also raises one of the defining questions of the social media era: how much of what we see online is genuine?
Shirilla, who is interviewed throughout the documentary from prison, maintains her innocence. She claims she blacked out before the crash due to a medical condition called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS – a disorder that affects blood circulation and can cause symptoms including dizziness, fainting, fatigue and rapid heartbeat when standing up – and claims she has no memory of the incident. The court rejected the argument, and no supporting medical testimony was ultimately presented at trial.
Netflix avoids positioning the documentary as an innocence campaign. The evidence remains difficult to ignore, and the film never truly suggests otherwise.
It occasionally suffers from the same problem as many modern true-crime documentaries, however, by stretching ambiguity for suspense even when the facts appear overwhelmingly clear. But at a brisk 92 minutes, it is still taut and absorbing.
Eventually, The Crash is not just a story about a fatal car crash. It is a stark look at what happens when an entire generation grows up online, leaving behind a searchable emotional trail that can later be dissected by detectives, lawyers, TikTok creators and millions of strangers.
