“I Don’t Need to Be Rehabilitated” — Mackenzie Shirilla’s Shocking Jail Call Exposes What She Really Thinks About Her Conviction

She is 21 years old. She is serving two sentences of 15 years to life. And in a phone call recorded from inside the Cuyahoga County Jail, Mackenzie Shirilla told her mother something that prosecutors, victims’ families and millions of people who have since watched the Netflix documentary about her case will not soon forget.

She does not believe she needs to be rehabilitated.

The Call That Says Everything

The undated jail call, obtained exclusively by PEOPLE, captures Mackenzie and her mother Natalie discussing what life behind bars might look like following her 2023 conviction — visitation schedules, school programs, resources available to inmates at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, where she is now serving her sentence.

At one point, Natalie tells her daughter that prison is meant to be rehabilitative — designed to help people rebuild before eventually returning to society.

Mackenzie’s response was immediate and unfiltered.

“See, that’s how jail is supposed to rehabilitate people, but I don’t need to be rehabilitated,” she said. “Like, I don’t know that.”

Her mother’s reply was equally revealing. Rehabilitation, Natalie told her daughter, was for inmates who had committed actual crimes.

“Not you, but people that have been convicted of crimes like actual criminals,” she said.

The exchange, brief as it is, cuts to the heart of everything that has made this case so deeply unsettling — a young woman convicted of intentionally killing two people who appears, at least in this moment, entirely unable to locate herself within that reality.

What She Was Convicted Of

On July 31, 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla, then 17, drove her sedan into a brick wall at nearly 100 mph in Strongsville, Ohio. Her boyfriend Dominic Russo, 20, and their friend Davion Flanagan, 19, were killed instantly. Shirilla was hospitalized with multiple injuries and claimed she had no memory of what happened.

Prosecutors argued the crash was premeditated — the result of a toxic and deteriorating relationship between Shirilla and Russo, who had been considering ending things for good in the days before his death. Car data showed she accelerated to full speed and never touched the brake in the five seconds before impact.

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A judge agreed. Shirilla was convicted on all 12 felony charges, including murder and aggravated vehicular homicide, and sentenced to two concurrent life terms. She will not be eligible for parole until 2037.

A Fear She Didn’t Expect to Have

Later in the same call, the conversation shifts — and a different side of Mackenzie surfaces. Thinking ahead to a future she cannot fully picture, she tells her mother she is afraid of who she will be if and when she is ever released.

“I’m just thinking about how I’m just gonna be like old when I get out of jail,” she says. “And like, I don’t know, like I’m not gonna be able to have kids or like a family.”

It is a moment of vulnerability that lands strangely after what came before it — a young woman grieving a future she may never have, spoken in the same breath as a refusal to accept any responsibility for why she is where she is.

Back in the Spotlight

The case has resurfaced in the public conversation following Netflix’s release of The Crash on May 15 — a documentary that brings together interviews from both Shirilla’s family and the families of Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan, offering two very different versions of the same story.

Mackenzie and her family have never wavered in their position that the crash was a medical accident, caused by a blackout episode linked to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

The judge who heard the evidence did not agree. Neither did the appeals court that reviewed the case.

And on a jail call that was never meant to be heard by the public, Mackenzie Shirilla made clear she still does not believe any of it applies to her.

Source: Compiled from various sources