Mackenzie Shirilla, the Ohio teen found guilty of deliberately driving her car into a brick wall at 100 mph, is making one last effort to overturn her conviction.
The crash happened in July 2022, when Shirilla, then 17, slammed her vehicle into a commercial property in Strongsville, Ohio. Two passengers were killed in the collision: her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and their friend, Davion Flanagan.
After a bench trial in 2023, she was convicted on four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, and two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide.
She later received a sentence of 15 years to life and is serving that term at the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
Now, her attorneys are arguing that mistakes in the handling of evidence and procedure mean she should be granted a fresh trial.
In her latest bid, Shirilla’s legal team has filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on July 28, 2026, asking for her convictions to be overturned and a new trial to be granted. Her attorneys argue her original defense team was ineffective for failing to present several pieces of evidence to the jury, including text messages showing that Russo had grabbed the steering wheel during a separate driving incident weeks before the crash. The petition also argues that Shirilla had a documented medical condition, POTS, which can cause sudden loss of consciousness, and that her original attorneys failed to disclose it to the court.
The petition challenges the Medical Examiner’s Office manner-of-death ruling, alleging it was improperly changed from “accidental” to “homicide” without following required legal procedures.
This federal filing follows multiple state-level appeals that have been rejected. The Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal on June 23, 2026, leaving in place a ruling that barred her postconviction challenge because it was filed one day late.
That filing was submitted on October 24, 2024, which the court determined was one day beyond the 365-day deadline required by law.
Her lawyers had argued the clock should have begun later, and also contended that the leap year in 2024 should have effectively given them an extra day. The court, however, found the filing was still late and dismissed it.
Earlier in 2026, the Eighth District Court of Appeals had also upheld a lower court ruling that rejected Shirilla’s petition for post-conviction relief on the same grounds.
The case has again drawn widespread attention following the release of the Netflix documentary The Crash, which premiered on May 15, 2026, and explores the fatal incident and the court proceedings that followed. The documentary was the most-watched film on Netflix for two consecutive weeks, achieving 27.6 million views in its second week.
At trial, prosecutors said Shirilla displayed a “shocking lack of remorse,” citing social media activity and TikToks posted in the months after Russo and Flanagan died.
Jurors also heard evidence from decoded prison phone calls in which Shirilla’s mother, Natalie Shirilla, told her that rehabilitation programs are for ‘actual criminals’.
The documentary has also prompted renewed efforts from the victims’ loved ones. Christine Russo, Dominic Russo’s sister, recently started a Change.org petition calling for ‘Dom and Davion’s Law’.
The measure would update Son of Sam laws to reflect the social media era, aiming to prevent people convicted of violent crimes from building online fame, influence, or financial gain from their offenses.
“Since the documentary aired, our family has had to relive this tragedy publicly over and over again,” Christine Russo wrote in the petition.
Shirilla has continued to say she lost consciousness because of a medical condition, POTS, and did not mean to cause the crash. But data from the vehicle showed the accelerator was fully pressed and that there was no braking before impact.
With courts repeatedly rejecting her challenges, Shirilla remains in prison as her remaining legal options narrow. She is expected to have her first parole hearing in September 2037, when she will be 33 years old.