The Crash: Why a Psychotherapist Thinks the Mackenzie Shirilla Trial Asked the Wrong Question
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2026
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Was it murder? That's the question the trial asked. A judge said yes. Netflix's The Crash put the evidence on screen and the public argued about the answer. But psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, who has spent thirty years studying violence and treating people on both sides of it, says the trial was asking the wrong question — and the answer to the right one is something far more complicated and far more tragic than either side is prepared to accept.
Shirilla was seventeen when the crash in Strongsville, Ohio killed Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. She was convicted of four counts of murder. She says she has no memory. A neurologist found evidence consistent with a medical episode. The families believe she's a monster. And the personality profile the prosecution built — the narcissism, the threats, the volatility — reads very differently to a clinician than it does to a courtroom.
Shavaun Scott, licensed psychotherapist and author of The Minds of Mass Killers, delivers a three-part psychological examination covering every dimension of this case. Her personality — why the traits that convicted her may actually signal something the system can't recognize. The relationship — why it was more mutual and more dangerous than the one-sided version the prosecution presented. And the aftermath — whether trauma-induced amnesia is clinically real, what grief does to the families' certainty, and a possibility that nobody in the courtroom was equipped to consider.
Two young men are gone. A young woman is in prison. Everyone picked a side. This conversation asks whether either side was looking at the right evidence.
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Transcript
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