CLEVELAND — More than a year after Mackenzie Shirilla was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life behind bars for killing 20-year-old Dominic Russo and 19-year-old Davion Flanagan in a Strongsville crash, the Eighth District Court of Appeals has upheld her conviction.
The defendant’s convictions for murder and felonious assault were supported by sufficient evidence and were not against the manifest weight of the evidence. Several witnesses testified that she and her boyfriend were in a loving relationship and that the defendant suffered from a medical condition that can cause dizziness. But the defendant had previously threatened to crash her car with her boyfriend inside during a fight; the defendant then did crash her car into a wall, killing the boyfriend and another passenger; a mechanical inspection revealed no latent mechanical defects that could have caused the crash; a medical examination of the defendant after the crash revealed no significant physical or mental abnormalities that would be indicative of a seizure or other neurological event; data from the vehicle’s computer revealed that the accelerator was depressed to a hundred percent and that the driver had not once hit the brake before hitting the wall. After reviewing the entire record, this was not the exceptional case where the evidence weighed heavily against conviction.
For the same reason that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the convictions, the State’s presentation of salient pieces of evidence to the juvenile court was sufficient to establish probable cause for a mandatory transfer of the case to the common pleas court for criminal prosecution.…