The Crash: What If Everyone in the Mackenzie Shirilla Case Is Telling Their Own Version of the Truth?
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dominic Russo's father says he needs the truth so he can grieve. But what if the truth he needs isn't the truth the evidence supports? What if grief has so completely fused with certainty that the family can't distinguish between what happened and what they need to believe happened?
Mackenzie Shirilla says she has no memory of the crash that killed Dominic and Davion Flanagan. The families say she's calculated and cold. A fellow inmate says the remorseful woman in the documentary is performance. The judge who convicted her also denied her post-conviction petition. Everyone in this case has landed on a version — and nobody's open to reconsidering.
Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott has spent over thirty years helping people navigate trauma and loss. She's worked with grieving families, with perpetrators of violence, and with people trapped between versions of reality they can't reconcile. She examines the psychology driving every side of the Mackenzie Shirilla case — the clinical reality of trauma-induced memory loss, how grief creates a need for a clear villain, whether remorse and performance can coexist in the same person, and the devastating question the system may be unable to process.
This conversation doesn't take sides. It examines how everyone involved in this case — the families, the prosecution, the defense, Mackenzie herself — has constructed a version of truth shaped by what they need it to be. And it asks what happens to justice when nobody in the room is seeing the evidence without a filter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brewski and Robin Drink. |
| 0:07.8 | Let's go into another chapter of this story. |
| 0:13.4 | McKenzie Shirilla says she has no memory of the crash, set it at the hospital, set it at trial, said it now from a prison in Netflix's The Crash. |
| 0:23.2 | The families don't believe her. Dominic's father says he just wants the truth so he can grieve. |
| 0:29.6 | Two young men are dead and everyone touched by this case is carrying something that they can't put down. |
| 0:36.3 | Shavon Scott, psychotherapist and authors with us to help break all of this down. |
| 0:41.0 | I want to talk about that, about the idea that McKenzie has no memory of what happened. |
| 0:49.4 | And the version of reality, the version of the truth, and I put that in air quotes, |
| 0:55.8 | that everybody wants. |
| 0:57.8 | Let's start with, is it a very real possibility that she does not remember what happened in those final moments? |
| 1:06.7 | Sure. |
| 1:07.3 | It's possible. |
| 1:08.5 | People who have gone through a traumatic event, particularly when they've been severely injured, can have a sense of, you know, I don't remember exactly what happened. Usually they have fragments, you know, bits and pieces. It may be nonlinear, but they have, you know, flashes of something. But the other thing that popped into |
| 1:30.0 | my head was head injury. Definitely, if she had a concussion, people lose memory after that often |
| 1:37.1 | and don't remember what led up to it. So that was my guess. I don't think we got enough about all |
| 1:43.8 | her medical, you know, data. What was what was all guess. I don't, I don't think we got enough about all her medical, you know, data, |
| 1:46.8 | what was what was all happening to her after that. But it certainly could have been something |
| 1:53.8 | that after the impact that the brain injury, just her brain wasn't working at that point. |
| 2:01.5 | Is it reasonable to think that she was trying to murder them? |
| 2:10.1 | Based on everything that we know, based on her track record of impulsive, volatile reactions to any sort of information that comes her way that she doesn't like. |
| 2:24.6 | And then this happening, is it reasonable to think that that she was attempting a murder here? |
| 2:31.3 | Or is it really just something else? |
... |
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