Content note: this post discusses a fatal car crash. We’ve kept out graphic detail.
Netflix’s The Crash has been sitting in the top ten since it dropped, and I think I know why. Most true crime asks “who did it?” This one knows exactly who did it from the first frame. The question it’s actually asking is much harder.
31 July 2022, Strongsville, Ohio
At about 5:30 in the morning, a Toyota Camry left the road in a quiet Cleveland suburb and hit a brick building at around 100 miles per hour. It didn’t brake. It didn’t swerve. Two of the three people inside were killed: Dominic Russo, 20, and his friend Davion Flanagan, 19.
The driver survived. Mackenzie Shirilla was 17, and Dominic was her boyfriend.
Accident, until it wasn’t
For a while, everyone treated it as a tragedy: a teenager, an early-morning drive, a terrible mistake. Then investigators pulled the car’s data recorder. The numbers said the car had accelerated steadily for several seconds, with the pedal held to the floor, straight into the wall.
Then came the texts and the videos. In the days before, Mackenzie and Dominic had been fighting, and friends later described the relationship as volatile on both sides. Prosecutors pieced that together with the data and charged her with murder.
The trial that wasn’t a jury trial
This is the detail that fascinated me. Mackenzie waived a jury, so a single judge, Nancy Margaret Russo (no relation to Dominic), heard everything and decided alone. In August 2023 the judge found her guilty of murder and called the crash intentional, describing the car as having been used as a weapon.
The sentence: 15 years to life. She was 19 by then.
What the documentary does differently
Instead of re-litigating guilt, The Crash spends its time on the “why.” It talks to both families, which is rarer than you’d think, and it lets the ugliness of a teenage relationship sit there without turning either person into a cartoon.
A few things I appreciated:
- It shows the data. You watch the speed climb with the investigators. No narrator telling you what to feel.
- It doesn’t rush the families. The Russos and the Flanagans get real time, and their grief isn’t background music.
- It’s honest about the mental-health questions without using them as an excuse or a verdict.
What I’d push back on: the doc is a little in love with its own slow pacing, and at over 90 minutes there’s a stretch in the middle that could have been ten minutes shorter.
Why it belongs on your list
Because it’s true crime without a mystery, and it still holds you. If you watched The Witness and liked that it centred the people left behind, this is in the same family.
Do you think the murder conviction was right, or should this have been a lesser charge? Comments are open, and I’m genuinely torn.
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