← Criminally Obsessed
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- [00:00]
A
Do we have it all wrong? Is Mackenzie Cirilla innocent of murdering her boyfriend and her friend? I'm Ann Emerson, and this is criminally Obsessed. Sharilla drove into a wall going 100 miles per hour deliberately. A judge convicted her, but if she had a jury trial instead of a bench trial, she might have walked. Because even though most of us think she's guilty, there are plenty of us that think there may be reasonable doubt. And it only takes one juror.
- [00:32]
B
There is reasonable doubt in the Mackenzie Sharrilla case, and I can prove it.
- [00:36]
A
Stephanie Giancaro is a defense attorney, but she's also a true crime tick tocker. And she says Shrilla's personality is clouding our judgment of the evidence.
- [00:47]
C
Talking about, tell them to shut the up.
- [00:50]
A
She's annoying as that's Sherilla on a jail call complaining about her dog. It appears that her typical mean girl behavior is the same behind bars.
- [00:59]
B
That documentary is literally just a bunch of people talking about how much they hated her because she was the mean girl in school. But does that make her a murderer? And the answer to that shouldn't be based on whether or not you like her personality. The answer to that should be, do the facts meet the elements of the crime?
- [01:16]
A
Listen, our criminal justice system is based on putting aside any bias to find the truth. So the no breaking the speed and the premeditation. Let's take a look at the other side of the coin. Some of the details that we've uncovered in the newly released public records will surprise you. Be sure to like and subscribe as we dig into the cases that you're obsessed with. Let's get into it. Well, thank you so much, Stephanie, for joining me. You know, I've been watching your videos that you've been doing on the McKenzie Scurrilla case, and it is. It's so interesting to me when. When we can kind of go back and look at these cases and be like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why are we just going with the flow? Why are we going with the tsunami of opinion that goes in one direction? And I feel like you're pulling it back with a little common sense, which is what I really enjoy about it.
- [02:14]
B
The. The thing I like to tell the people that are listening to me or the people that follow me is that the law is reason free from emotion. It is truly horrific that Dom and Davion lost their lives. It's very sad. I feel for their families. But when you look analytically at the case, and you look analytically at the elements that you need to meet for the crime that she was found guilty of. Did we make that? Did the judge get there? Did. Would a jury have gotten there? And you have to take the emotion out of that or else you're never going to be able to see clearly through the. See the forest of the trees.
- [02:53]
A
As you approach this, as someone who is looking at sometimes at the worst. The worst cases, when you started looking at this case, what was your initial gut reaction to this case?
- [03:04]
B
This is an accident. This is an accident. Not all accidents are murder. And I've seen in. In cases where I am now that where people have been charged with murder, manslaughter, or vehicular homicide for crimes that are just literally an accident. Not every accident is a crime. And that was the. Because I remember when this case happened, and I remember thinking, they're not going to charge her with this. And then they went and they did. And I was so surprised by that because to get from A to B is such a stretch to me that it just. It blew my. It blew my mind, truthfully. It just blew my mind.
- [03:43]
A
Well, they certainly took a lot of leaps. I agree with you. But when you were looking at the evidence, when you got the evidence in front of you, did anything change as far as how you approached looking at it?
- [03:56]
B
To be quite honest with you, no, it really didn't. There are a lot of people that are focusing sort of on, you know, she intended to go into the wall, but in order to sort of get to that point, you would have to believe then that she intended to also kill herself. And if you look at the kind of person that she was, and this is really where I truly jumped on the not guilty bandwagon was her Snapchat videos, her text messages, her Instagrams, her tiktoks. Mackenzie loved herself so much, and she was so into her appearance and becoming an influencer and having friends and being popular and would have to suspend all reality and truly believe that she was willing to end it and take all of that away for herself to believe that she's guilty of this crime, to argue that because she was going 100 miles per hour she intended to murder two people is a wild take.
- [05:05]
A
Going 100 miles per hour down a road because it seemed like a good idea at the time. It doesn't. You're saying this is not murderous behavior. This is just dumb reckless behavior?
- [05:19]
B
I don't if to me, the going down 100 miles per hour is absolute reckless driving. Do not get me wrong, that is absolutely reckless. Traveling. And I know that when I was her age, I was doing dumb stuff like that myself. I don't think that when she was going 100 miles per hour, the thought in her head was, I'm going to drive into a wall. I don't think that she would because there is absolute no guarantee she would survive that. There is no guarantee she's walking away from that. And you would have to literally suspend all of your belief that she was going, that she wanted. You would have to believe she wanted to die at that point. And I don't know how, based on what we know about her and what we've seen from her, from the text messages and her social media. I don't think she was driving 100 miles down that road that day to die. I don't think that that's what she was doing. In the grand jury presentation that was also then presented to the judge during the trial, there is a diagram and you can see the grand jury presentation. It's in the FOIA documents that are on the Strong School website. There is a diagram of the trajectory and the path of the car and it shows that the path of the vehicle prior to the end of the street. So you have progress road, right, and then it backs up to Alameda. She started to go to the right. She hopped the cur, like hopped the side and started turning. The not turning, but heading towards, making a right turn. And you can see that through the tire tracks on the road. In my opinion and evaluating evidence, I would have blown that, that picture up and I would have showed that to the jury if there was a jury. And my argument would have been is that she was going as fast as she was going. Yes, but it was her intent to make that right turn. And you could see that that was her intent because she starts farther back, starting to head towards the right and then she's just going too fast and she can't pull it off. She just is an inexperienced driver. She doesn't know what she's doing. She's only had her license for six months. The car can't handle that. And you can see because there's also that 170 degree turn that the car makes, right? So she, at the last second she's trying to turn the car. And those two things coupled together I think show that she had the intent of moving or getting going that way, but it just didn't happen because she doesn't know how to control a car. And she was going too fast. But that picture I would have blown up and I would have shown to the jury and I would have kept it up the whole time just so they could routinely see that she was heading to the right, she just couldn't control the car and she was going too fast. Is that reckless driving? Yes. Is it a crime? Yes. Is it murder? No, not murder.
- [08:08]
A
Be. Involuntary manslaughter is.
- [08:10]
B
Yes.
- [08:11]
A
Yeah.
- [08:11]
B
Yes. I would say involuntary manslaughter.
- [08:14]
A
Do you think that things would have turned out differently if she had gotten a jury trial?
- [08:19]
B
I do. I think that they. There would have at least been one. There, There had to have been at least one. I, I understand why her attorneys went bench, but we have the gift of why did they.
- [08:29]
A
I don't understand.
- [08:30]
B
Obviously, we have the option, right? We have a bench option. We have a jury option. When a case is very law specific or the issue is a legal issue, we tend to suggest a bench trial because a jury gets sort of lost in the sauce of the legality. So this came down to a very much of an intent and a premeditation issue which could and would have probably been lost on a jury if not presented properly. A judge, though, understands those legal principles better than a jury ever is going to understand because they went to law school, they've handled cases themselves, but I understand why they did. But we have the gift of hindsight.
- [09:08]
A
Sure.
- [09:09]
B
We know that it didn't work and we know that the judge was more emotional than we expected her to be. So it, you know, we, they went bench thinking, less emotion and then they got emotion and yeah, it didn't really work out for them. But I think, I think a jury in hindsight, if they, if they end up, the appeal ends up succeeding, which I don't, I don't necessarily think that it will, but if it does, I think they would go jury the second time around.
- [09:40]
A
Why do you think the jurors would have had reasonable doubt?
- [09:47]
B
So the way I explain it in relation to this case is that there's such a discourse about what happened. Right. So there's, for instance, talking about the 170 degree turn. People will argue, well, it could have been Dom that pulled the wheel, or it could have been McKenzie that pulled the wheel, or it could have even been Davion from the back that jumped and pulled the wheel, or it could have been the abs of the car that just jerked the wheel when the, when the airbags popped off, when she jumped the curb. If we don't know the answer to that question and we're all sitting around talking and those are all reasonable explanations for why the car jerked to the right. That's reasonable doubt. Right. Because if we can't come up with a rational explanation or a reasonable explanation for why the car went that way and then hit the corner of the wall, how could we possibly say she did it on purpose? If there's four reasonable explanations for why it hit that corner of the wall, if we can't come up with one, and there are three other ones that possibly fit the fact pattern, then how can we say that the one the prosecution wants is the right one? But I don't think the other three were ever presented to the jury. I'm not sure if they were. I'm not sure how it was presented. But at the end of the day, if there's four reasonable explanations, that's reasonable doubt.
- [11:12]
A
She uses this argument. And I'm not saying it didn't happen with the pots. Again, reasonable doubt, what you're talking about, POTS being this. This condition, this medical condition that would have made her possibly black out for a moment. Why is. Why is the defense using pots, though? Since just seems to go against her. Her argument in some ways, Like, I agree.
- [11:39]
B
I don't know why they use that. I don't. If the second trial happens, if it ever gets appealed, like reverse on appeal, I don't know if they'll go with pots again, if I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure they'll go along. They'll go with that. I certainly would not. I think that there's enough evidence without the POTS to find reasonable doubt. I don't think you need that, because I don't. It doesn't really fit in with the evidence that we have. Right. There's. There's enough evidence without it for me to. To me. For me to. So reasonable doubt. So I don't think that it's necessary. But I also can see why they would have jumped on that as sort of. As a. As a reason, because if she was actually diagnosed with it, which I do believe that she was. I think she was diagnosed in 2017. But I. It wasn't helpful. It just made it seem more like an excuse rather than an explanation, which is problematic and would have been problematic to a jury if they had heard it. There is reasonable doubt in the Mackenzie Shrilla case, and I can prove it.
- [12:53]
A
One thing that is. Has piqued my interest is the idea that they looked at prior intent, that she was planning this because. Premeditation. Because of visiting the area previously.
- [13:06]
B
Yes. And yeah. So there's testimony from the expert in the prosecution's case that clears that all up. And essentially what happens is they can't actually put her on the street. They can put her in the area. So the prosecution's own witness says I have her in the area, but I do not have her on that street. So the, the discourse about there being a dry run is absolute misinformation. There is no actual proof that she has ever been on that road before. It's just in the area so she could have been. But there's no, there is no testimony one way or the other that she had ever been on that road before.
- [13:49]
A
Well, was there any reason for her to be in that area?
- [13:53]
B
From what I understand and that from some of the testimony, that is a cut through road. So like to avoid the main road where the cops are, people take that back road and go through. So I mean I'm sure there could be a thousand reasons why she was on that road if they could prove she was on the road or there could be a thousand reasons why she's in that area. I believe that that was at close to Dom's house. I could be mistaken. But you know, it's a small town, it's not a large town, so. Yeah, and kids like to go for joy rides. You know, they like to go smoke with their friends and we know that they were doing that. So it's a dead end street. That would definitely be a spot I could imagine someone picking to hide from the cops and go smoke with my friends.
- [14:36]
A
Yeah, and there's another thing too that these. The idea that she was the only one wearing her seatbelt. I've heard that a few times.
- [14:47]
B
So the testimony at trial is that both front seatbelts were engaged. Now what engaged means can mean different things to different people. The photograph of the front passenger seat seems to appear that the seatbelt in the passenger seat is cut. Now to me, if the front passenger seat seatbelt is cut, to me that seems as if the individual was wearing it and they had to cut it to get it off. I don't know that for sure though. However, she seems to have been wearing her seatbelt, which is probably what saved her life. Whether the passenger was wearing it or not is questionable. But that seat belt was engaged, meaning that it was plugged in. Whether it crossed his body or not, I don't know the answer to that question. But either way that was engaged. So there you could argue both. You could argue both. Again adding to the reasonable doubt of, you know, she intended to do this.
- [15:46]
A
In other words, that was misinformation. He was literally in his seatbelt and had to be cut out of his seatbelt or.
- [15:54]
B
Or what?
- [15:55]
A
That's the only option, right?
- [15:57]
B
From the picture of the seatbelt, it looks, I can't, obviously I don't have the official record, so I can't confirm it, but it looks as if the seatbelt was cut. To me, it looks like the seatbelt was cut. I don't know whether it was or it was not, but the seatbelt was engaged, meaning that it was plugged into the little thing. The beeping would have stopped whether they did that. Just, you know, you know how sometimes you like plug it behind you so it stops the beeping. He could have also done that. So it could have either been he was wearing it across his body or he plugged it in behind him so the beeping would stop. One of those two things happened because the seatbelt was engaged in the front passenger seat. Which one it was, I don't know.
- [16:38]
A
And that's, that's something that I didn't understand when they were making the argument about how this was premeditated. If she was the only one wearing her seatbelt, it's like, what did she tell them not to put their seatbelt on? Like, that didn't make sense to me in the first place.
- [16:53]
B
Right. You would have to, you would have to believe that she is this absolute masterful sociopath that was like, oh, don't worry guys, we're only going to go 100 miles per hour. Don't worry about your seatbelts. Right. That makes she's absolute zero sense.
- [17:10]
A
My producers were looking at Google just to see like, this specific engine and the model year that it takes this Camry roughly 8 to 14 seconds to accelerate from 40 to 100 miles per hour. So basically everybody in the car had time to panic.
- [17:26]
B
If it takes that long for that car to go fast, if there was an argument going on in that car, if there was a fight going on in that car, that gave them 8 to 14 seconds to throw their seatbelts on to. If they thought something bad was going to happen, that gave them 8 to 14 seconds to try and put, you know, scramble down and hit the brake or try to jump over onto her side. Eight to 14 seconds is, is not a short period of time when you're thinking about whether or not you get a car to go from 0 to 100. There could have been things that they could have done in that time. You could argue, though the prosecution would counter argue, well, the car went from neutral to par or neutral to driver, to drive to neutral. That could be the prosecution's counterpoint to that. Well, they tried. They shifted it from neutral. But you, again, you can't prove that because they didn't take fingerprints from the neutral of the park. They didn't, you know, they didn't do any of that stuff.
- [18:23]
A
I think that was what the emotive part of it was, too, that that would have gotten the judge as far as what those last few seconds were looking like in the car and who was trying to grapple with what. But with a jury. There's only one person on that jury that's going to have to.
- [18:45]
B
Yep, right. Yep. Only one. You only need one. You only need one.
- [18:52]
A
And do you think that that would have made a lot more sense like that, that you would have been able to get that?
- [18:58]
B
In hindsight? Yes, absolutely. I think in hindsight, I think looking back at everything and knowing what. Like what the public. Knowing what we know now, I think, yes, I think the public now just doesn't like her because she comes off ratty. Right. Like, if you watch, like, the Mean Girl Murders on Hulu, that that documentary is literally just a bunch of people talking about how much they hated her because she was the mean girl in school. Right. You know, it's. It's. You can hate her personality, you can hate the way she was raised, you can hate the way she acted, but does that make her a murderer? Does that make her a killer? And the answer to that shouldn't be based on whether or not you like her personality. The answer to that should be, do the facts meet the elements of the crime? I don't think they do.
- [19:50]
A
I did want to ask you one thing about Dom's past. Is that something that it really wasn't delved into? From what I could tell about what Dom was doing, I think there was, like, one text that I saw, something about, you know, that somebody allegedly wanted to buy drugs off of Dom, that sort of thing. Would that be something that you would
- [20:11]
B
dig into if it came up at trial? Yes, and I. There are some situations in which it might. For instance, if someone in his family testified and started talking about what a wonderful person he was and his credibility then comes into question. I think it's partially relevant because of the way they have portrayed her as being this toxic girlfriend who was horrible to him and abused him. But if you go through all the text messages, they were equally as bad to each other. So I think it's only fair play if you're going to talk about how bad she was you have to, in the same context, talk about how he treated her as well.
- [21:00]
A
Well, the reason I was asking about that was because there was a big question that came up in the documentary at least about who was actually saying they were going to crash the car, who was actually kind of putting each other in danger. Two weeks before this happened, there was
- [21:14]
B
testimony that a friend of Dom's mom, I think whoever went to go pick up Dom that night on the side of the road, heard her say, I'll wreck this car. I'll wreck this car right now. The verbiage changes from the grand jury testimony to the trial testimony, but it's essentially I'll wreck this car right now. What they leave out of the testimony is everything that he heard prior to that and after that of the argument that they were having. You don't just say, I'm going to wreck this car right now out of the blue. You don't just randomly say that there's a pretext and a post text. There's something that you're. That someone is saying that for a reason. Now there's also been a video that's been released on social media of Dom saying the exact same thing to her while they're riding around in a car. She recorded it and it's been posted on social media platforms. So again, if, if I was a defense attorney, I would then show that video. If one of them is saying, and then the other one is saying it, they sort of negate each other in a manner. Right. So you can't have one without the other. It goes both ways.
- [22:27]
A
And the prosecution was able to, you know, bring in some experts and look at the slipper that was in the car and how it was sort of molded around the, the, the acceleration, the gas pedal, I guess. Did you take anything away from that?
- [22:43]
B
A lot of people are arguing that point too. Whether it got stuck and that's what it caused the accelerator to go, or whether or not it wasn't stuck. I don't necessarily think that that is the smoking gun that everybody thinks that it is. It certainly could be helpful. The defense would need to hire an expert to take a look at the photograph. That is where the defense is lacking, in my opinion, was the lack of expert opinion that they had because you have the state going up and saying all of these things with expert opinions. So if I, if I showed that picture to an expert and they were like, oh no, this absolutely would. I could tell you with 198 certainty that this is a picture that shows that the Slipper got stuck on the accelerator, and that's what caused it to go 100 miles per hour into a wall. Then 100%. You use that. Right. I don't have enough expertise to know whether or not this looking at a picture is a slipper that's stuck under an accelerator. But if that's the case, and an expert told me that that's what it looks like, I would be using that at trial, without a doubt. So I think that that's sort of where the defense was lacking a little bit was in their inability to secure proper experts to help with the defense, in my opinion.
- [23:58]
A
When I saw that slipper, I thought that was my. Honestly, that was my reasonable doubt. Would you have put her on the stand?
- [24:05]
B
No. No, because I've heard those jail calls. Absolutely not.
- [24:11]
C
She's so annoying. Like, I literally hate her. Like, first last night, like, I'm trying to go to bed, and she just gets to, like, singing like this, and she's like. For the weird boy, like, it did not sou at all. Like, it was so irritating. Like, it sounded like a horror movie. I was like, what the. She was talking about? Tell them to shut the up. She's annoying as. Hi, how are you? Yeah, here. They have crazy people here, like, mentally ill.
- [24:35]
A
I mean, she's just not. You don't. You don't feel sorry for her, do you?
- [24:39]
B
I think she got dealt a bad hand, and I think she got railroaded. So I do feel. I do feel bad for her. And I. You know, I've listened to her jail calls, and I also have clients that are in custody. So I do know the toll that it takes on an individual who is young and in prison. So I do. On some levels, I do feel bad for her. I think she's a victim as well. But that doesn't also take away from Dom and Davion being victims of this, too. I. I don't want to. I don't want to mince words there. They are victims of this crime, okay? They. They lost their lives, and that's incredibly sad and horrific. But she was. She's also a victim here, too, because this, you know, she. She could have died, too. And now she's. I don't think she's guilty. I don't think she's guilty of murder.
- [25:32]
A
Do you think she's shown remorse?
- [25:35]
B
I think she showed remorse in her own way.
- [25:37]
C
Yeah.
- [25:37]
B
I think what we're seeing and what we've seen publicly is all the bad stuff. I've had people that kind of come into My lives that have known her and have talked on my lives that have known her that, you know, will say, you know, you didn't see her the month that, you know, the couple months afterwards, crying all the time and going to visit the grave sites and going to visit the, the center scene of the accident. You know, you only see the, the fun pictures from Halloween, you know, because that makes her look bad. You only see the terrible things that she said or done because it makes her look bad. But you don't see what else is going on. And also, everyone grieves differently. Everyone shows remorse differently. Just because she's laughing and giggling doesn't necessarily mean that she's not upset or sad or remorseful.
- [26:23]
A
Can you tell us what the basis of their appeal is right now?
- [26:27]
B
So the one that's going to the Supreme Court in Ohio right now is the one on the timing of the motion. So whether or not they're allowed to then go back and file the appeal. So nothing, everything is stalled until the Supreme Court says the day does not matter. The one day is not a big deal.
- [26:47]
A
Do you think they'll do that? You don't think she's got a great shot at that, though, do you?
- [26:52]
B
You know, they're pretty stringent about timelines. God. So I, I honestly, I don't, I don't know if this gets denied. I'm, I'm not sure she could do much more.
- [27:05]
A
So if you, if you were going to be a betting person, like, I mean, if she, if she somehow makes it through this appeal process and is allowed to retry this, I mean, what are the chances that, that a jury would actually find reasonable doubt on this, do you think?
- [27:23]
B
60, 40, 60, 40? Reasonable doubt? I think she has a decent chance. I think she has a decent chance if the defense does what they're supposed to do, which is get the experts, evaluate the, evaluate the evidence through the eyes of the experts and be prepared for the prosecution's arguments in a way that benefits her and, and also mitigates her public per her Persona. If they can do those things, she's good to go.
- [27:52]
A
It looks like mackenzie Troll has got a long road on these appeals. We'll see what happens. But drop a comment below and tell me, do you think she deserves another trial, maybe a jury trial this time? Do you think she would have gotten off the first time if they had done a jury trial? I want to hear your thoughts and be sure to like and subscribe and turn on your notifications because I seriously do not want you to miss anything, any of our updates?