An Ohio teenager, Mackenzie Shirilla, was sentenced to prison for the death of her boyfriend and his friend in July 2022 after intentionally crashing a car, and will not be granted an appeal because her attorney filed the paperwork too late.
Car Crash
On the morning of July 31, 2022, then 17-year-old Shirilla was speeding upward of 100mph when she crashed into a brick wall of a warehouse in Strongsville, a Cleveland suburb, killing her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, 20, and his 19-year-old friend Davion Flanagan. She was driving them home from a high school graduation party before the horrific event. She became known as the “hell on wheels” killer.
While Shirilla somehow survived the incident, she was found unconscious at the scene, behind the wheel with her Prada-wearing slippers still on the accelerator. Before her arrest, she had joked on TikTok about how she was “just one of those girls that can do a lot of drugs and not die.”
She was convicted on four counts of felonious assault and two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide in 2023. She broke down in tears as the verdict was read and the judge referred to her as “literal hell on wheels.”
“This was not reckless driving — this was murder,” Cuyahoga County Judge Nancy Margaret Russo said in court. “She had a mission, and she executed it with precision. The decision was death.”
Shirilla was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison and sought a new trial, which was denied last week due to it being filed one day past the deadline. She is currently imprisoned at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio, and will possibly remain there for the entirety of her sentence.
Appeal Denied
Ohio’s Eighth District Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s decision to deny Shirilla’s appeal since it was filed one day past the 365-day jurisdictional deadline. Under state law, a defendant who wishes to appeal their verdict has 365 days from the date the trial transcript is filed with the court of appeals to file a petition for an appeal.
“The filing of a postconviction petition is a jurisdictional act,” the ruling said, which was released last week. “Because the appellant filed the petition on the 366th day following the filing of the trial transcript, the trial court was without jurisdiction to consider the merits of the claims, and the application of equitable tolling is prohibited in the context of this jurisdictional bar.”
In Shirilla’s case, her deadline to file an appeal was October 23, 2024, and her attorney filed it the following day on October 24. She filed an appeal to the Eighth District, arguing the clock on the 365-day deadline did not start until December 15, 2023, when the hearing transcripts from her juvenile case were filed in adult court.
However, the justices cited that her juvenile hearing did not satisfy the statutory requirement of “trial transcripts,” leading them to deny her appeal. Shirilla also attempted to argue that since 2024 was a leap year, she should be granted an extra day to file her petition.
“Ohio law is clear that PCR petitions must be filed within 365 days after the trial transcript is filed in the court of appeals, not on the date’s ‘one year anniversary,’” the justices responded in their disagreement.
Netflix Documentary
Netflix has scheduled the release of a documentary on the vehicular homicides. What appeared to be an accident upon initial investigation, it was soon uncovered to be a horrific intentional homicide. The documentary is premiering on May 15 and is supposed to take a deep dive into the relationship that allegedly led to this incident and examine the narratives surrounding the crash.
