The dad of “Hell on Wheels” killer Mackenzie Shirilla claims she didn’t purposely kill her boyfriend in a 2022 car wreck — because she could have just used one of the victim’s guns if she really wanted him dead.
Steve Shirilla insisted on the podcast “True Crime This Week” on Wednesday that his daughter has “remorse” for causing the deaths of her boyfriend, 21-year-old Dominic Russo, and his pal, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan, who was considered collateral damage, but didn’t mean for it to happen, TMZ reported.
His comments surfaced as it was revealed Mackenzie and her mom once cackled over the attention her case was garnering, discussed writing a book about it — and predicted she’d soon be rubbing elbows with A-listers and was potentially on her way to a Hollywood career.
“She was 17. She’s a dumb kid. She didn’t do it on purpose,” Steve told host James Renner of his daughter’s heinous crime.
“I’ve asked her…’Did you do this on purpose?’ And she’s going, ‘No,’ ” he said.
“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.
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“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.
