The Crash
A Netflix Documentary, a Moral Inheritance, and the Work of Collective Responsibility
I have a guilty secret: I love true crime documentaries.
Last week, I watched The Crash, a Netflix documentary about the 2022 case of 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, who was convicted of double murder for intentionally crashing her car into a brick building at 100 mph, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and their friend Davion Flanagan.
As a defense lawyer, I am sympathetic to people who are accused of committing crimes. I believe, like Bryan Stevenson, that each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done; that the sum of our worst days does not define us.
A large part of my job is untangling the narrative of the life that led my clients to the conduct for which they are being judged, to help the court to see not just the full person, but also the particular set of circumstances that led that person to do what they did.
I have represented clients who have experienced trauma, mental illness, deprivation and desperation. And I have seen young people make split-second choices with disastrous consequences.
17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla is a young person who made such a choice.
Near the start of The Crash, Tim Troup, the Assistant County Prosecutor for Cuyahoga County in Cleveland, Ohio who prosecuted the case againt her, is shown seated at a gleaming desk, a wall of windows framing a cityscape of tall buildings, in the shadows to his left, an American flag hangs limply. He sits back in his chair, his hands clasped in front of him.
“I’ve worked on easily, over a thousand serious felony cases,” he tells us. The prosecution of Ms. Shirilla is “without a doubt the most significant case I ever worked on.” We will never know why he feels this way, or the barometer by which measures the significance of cases he has worked on. If he shared this with the filmmakers, it did not make the final cut.
I am thinking and writing about this because I am tired of dissecting executive orders and court decisions. It has started to feel like a wholly meaningless exercise.
Last week, the case against four peopled indicted in October after protesting outside a suburban Chicago immigration center was dismissed after what might once have passed for shocking prosecutorial conduct during the grand jury process that secured the protesters’ indictment. When the court first requested the grand jury transcripts, the government turned over a heavily redacted set. Only later did the government turn over the unredacted transcripts.
These transcripts made clear that prosecutors had vouched for their own case with the grand jurors, putting their credibility on the line when their proof was insufficient. They had improper conversations with those jurors outside of the grand jury room. They removed jurors who didn’t vote their way. And they concealed what they had done.
Judge April Perry, a United States District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, who spent twelve years as a prosecutor in the same office as the prosecutors who secured the indictment of the protesters, had this to say:
I am incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.
What’s shocking isn’t merely that prosecutors violated rules. It’s the contempt that their violations lay bare—for the grand jury, for the accused, and for the restraints that are supposed to keep state power from becoming brute force.
“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry reminded Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who appeared in court, ostensibly to apologize for the mistakes of his subordinates.
But these were not mistakes. This was power doing what power does when it believes itself immune from consequence.
Something has cracked, but what has cracked is surface.
What was underneath was always broken.
I know in my heart this is true.
My mentor, Liz Fink, taught me that my job as a federal criminal defense lawyer is to stand between my client and the crushing weight of government power. Not because the courts reliably deliver justice. Because they so often do not.
Liz was fond of quoting the Lenny Bruce line about “the halls of justice, where the only justice is in the halls.” She used to tell me that you could sometimes find justice in the state courthouse across the street, where it was loud and dirty and chaotic, where people talked over one another and it was hard to hear yourself think. But in the federal courts where we practiced — in buildings like 40 Foley Square, with their veined marble, bronze detailing, hushed corridors, and pristine courtrooms, where everyone was polite and everything appeared orderly — justice was far more elusive.
Even when the government follows the rules, or doesn’t get caught breaking them, justice is not their client.
It’s not what they seek.
Winning is.
My father knew this. He started out believing in justice, and the courts as a means to that end, and at some point along the way, he lost that faith.
It began eroding during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, which, coincidentally, also took place in the very same courthouse in Chicago where Judge Perry sits. And it was eviscerated by the massacre at Attica Correctional Facility.
“I never quite recovered from Attica,” he wrote.
For a long time afterward, I was filled with hate. I hated the public officials who allowed the massacre to happen. I hated their coldness, their inhumanity. What I saw and heard at Attica added to my experiences in Chicago and crystallized my political thinking. While I learned in Chicago that the government is dirty and corrupt and will utilize any means necessary to prevent dissent, Attica showed me that the government call also be heartless and will even sacrifice the lives of its own to save face and protect the status quo.
I write about this a lot because I think about it a lot—how my dad built his belief system, and how he rebuilt it after it shattered. It is part of my inheritance—this broken-and-rebuilt carapace, misshapen and many-sided. At some angles, hard to look at. Beautiful where its edges have been worn down, where the misjoined pieces have healed, where it shines. I keep it in the closet of my mind, but sometimes I take it out and turn it over in my hands, feel its weight, hold it up to the light, try to make sense of it, try to make it mine.
But I can’t.
You can inherit a belief system, but you can’t climb inside it, can’t wear it, can’t make it yours—not completely. These things come from living. They are homes we have to build for ourselves.
At approximately 5:34 in the morning on July 31, 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla turned her black Toyota Camry west onto Progress Drive. Dominic Russo was in the front passenger seat, Davion Flanagan was in the back. Two minutes later, the car veered off Progress, crossed grass, went through the intersection of Alameda Drive, hit a business sign, and crashed into the corner of the building at 11792 Alameda Drive.
Shirilla’s defense was that she suffered a medical emergency and blacked out. But it’s hard to reconcile that with how fast she was driving, navigating the S-curve of Progress Drive at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. According to the car’s data recorder, during the last five seconds before impact, she pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
This is the fact that mattered most to the judge.
“The [crash] video clearly shows purpose and intent,” the court said when rendering its verdict. “[Shirilla] chose a course of death and destruction that day. She morphs from a responsible driver to literal hell on wheels as she makes her way down the street.”
Shirilla was found guilty of two counts of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life on each count, run concurrently.
The focus on intent — on what Shirilla meant to happen — feels like a failure to me. It is one of the many ways the blunt instrument of our justice system fails to reckon with harm. If Shirilla intended to kill Russo and Flanagan, she also intended to kill herself. Driving at top speed into a brick wall is an act of obliteration.
Maybe, on that five-minute early morning drive, as they made their way home, dehydrated and bleary-eyed from an all-night party, Russo tried to end their relationship. Maybe Shirilla saw this as the end of her world and decided to really end it. Or maybe she wanted her passengers to think she was going to crash the car, but did not mean to go through with it, and the gathering speed carried her further than she meant to go. Maybe it came from nowhere at all: an incomprehensible lurch toward oblivion.
I don’t believe that she blacked out and remembers nothing, as she tells us in the documentary, although I guess its possible that the trauma of the crash wiped her memory. I definitely don’t believe that she suffered a medical emergency. I think she made a choice.
But believing that she made a choice is not the same as believing that she understood, in any real way, the finality of what she was doing. Whatever might have been in Shirilla’s mind at that moment, what happened on Progress Drive belongs to the terrible category of decisions young people sometimes make: impulsive, catastrophic, and blind to consequence until the consequence is already here.
At Shirilla’s sentencing, Flanagan’s younger sister asked for the “longest possible sentence.”
Flanagan’s father tells the filmmakers, “I just wanted my son’s life to have concrete value in the term of years. And if that was 15, okay. If that was 30, I would be happier with that.”
This is how our justice system teaches us to measure the value of a life. The length of a sentence becomes a scorecard. Fifteen years means one thing. Thirty years means something more. Life means the loss has been taken seriously.
But Russo and Flanagan’s lives are worth far more than any term of imprisonment could ever capture.
And so is Shirilla’s.
If she had died in the crash, she would be mourned as a victim. Because she lived, she became the person through whom the system tries to balance the books. Her punishment is treated as an accounting for loss.
But it will never be enough.
This is what happens when we expect justice to come from courts. The system gives us the only thing it knows how to give: punishment.
What we want is for the dead to be restored to the people who loved them.
And no sentence can do that.
On September 26, 2025, Kat Abughazaleh, a journalist running for Congress in Illinois’s 9th District, was arrested while protesting the inhumane conditions at the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Five others were arrested with her, including Michael Rabbitt, the Democratic Committeeperson for Chicago’s 45th Ward, and Catherine Sharp, who is running for the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Charges against two of the six were dropped in March of 2026, leaving the four defendants whose cases were dismissed last week.
The indictment against the “Broadview Six” alleged a conspiracy to impede or injure an officer by surrounding a federal agent’s vehicle and slowing its approach to the building. “It was further part of the conspiracy that the co-conspirators … physically hindered and impeded Agent A and the Government Vehicle such that Agent A was forced to drive at an extremely slow rate of speed to avoid injuring any of the conspirators and in doing so slowly progressed towards the [ICE facility] to discharge the duties of his office,” the indictment reads.
In other words: they forced an ICE van to drive slowly.
It was, apparently, an incredibly difficult indictment for prosecutors to secure—so difficult that they had to dismiss jurors they couldn’t convince, have secret (and highly inappropriate) out-of-court conversations with other jurors, and personally vouch for the strength of their case.
Trust us, we are the government.
I have seen this play out in courtrooms before: when prosecutors don’t have enough evidence, they appeal to public trust.
Over 25 years ago, shortly after I graduated college and before I decided to go to law school, I sat in a courtroom in Tulia, Texas, during the trial of Kareem Abdul Jabbar White. White was one of 46 people ensnared in a 1999 drug sting on the word of undercover officer Tom Coleman, who had left his previous law enforcement position in the middle of a shift without bothering to return his patrol car and had a reputation for untruthfulness. Yet despite the lack of corroborating evidence, more than 10% of Tulia’s tiny Black population was arrested on the strength of his word alone.
At White’s trial, Coleman changed his testimony so many times that the district attorney was left arguing to the jury that, if they let White go free, they were calling their sheriff a liar. White was convicted and sentenced to 60 years.
For his efforts, in 1999, Coleman was named “Texas Law Man of the Year” by the Texas Department of Public Safety. After his fraud came to light, thirty-five of the Tulia defendants, including White, were pardoned.
At the hearing last week in Chicago before Judge Perry, U.S. Attorney Boutros told the court that once he “became aware of the conduct in the grand jury,” the charges were dismissed within 24 hours. But he doubled down on his condemnation of the protesters’ conduct, calling it “unacceptable in a civilized society.”
What is acceptable in a “civilized society”? And who do we want patroling its boundaries?
Certainly not Boutros.
For him, standing up for civilized society apparently means allowing our president to use our “justice” system to intimidate people who dare to stand up to him. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Boutros had opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll focusing on whether she committed perjury in the two civil lawsuits she won against the president: the first for sexual assault and defamation, and the second for continuing to defame her after she won the first one.
It’s unclear what connection such an investigation would have to the Northern District of Chicago. Probably none. Per the New York Times,
The Justice Department’s leadership … has made extensive use of a provision that allows the designation of cases to handpicked prosecutors across the country, regardless of whether possible crimes occurred in their jurisdictions.
This past April, the Illinois Accountability Commission released its report on “Operation Midway Blitz,” the ICE operation underway in Chicago that the Broadview Six were protesting.
Among other things, the Commission found that “Federal immigration agents engaged in dangerous high-speed vehicular pursuits, extreme physical force, indiscriminate use of chemical agents, shootings, beatings, and other violent acts, amounting to unconstitutional uses of force” and that officials from ICE, CPB, DHS and the White House “routinely lied to the public about the motivations and outcomes of Operation Midway Blitz and concealed and distorted key facts about events involving federal immigration agents.”
To obscure the extent of its own depravity, our government is coming after people who stand up for their neighbors and insist that the people it targets still belong.
A civilized society is not threatened by that kind of solidarity.
It is built from it.
My father lost his faith in the law. He came to believe that courts were instruments of an oppressive system.
But it was not the end of his moral life. He kept going. He kept defending people. He kept standing next to the accused, the despised, the condemned.
And he never gave in to pessimism.
That is the part of my inheritance I am trying to make my own.
Not the faith he lost, but what he rebuilt from its wreckage: a refusal to give in to despair, and an insistence that when the law fails, when power lies, when punishment is mistaken for justice, that there is still work to do.
And that we are the ones who must do it.
Tell it like it is sister. Love R.
Thank you, Sarah, for continuing to try to write even as it’s harder for all of us I think to organize our thoughts. My first thought is to ask whether we live in a civilized society. You and your father‘s work taught me that we were barely in a civilized society before recent turns of events, but I think we might’ve passed a threshold. I’m not sure what that means though. As a person deeply skeptical of violence, including in resistance, that doesn’t mean that we behave violently, but it does mean that when we’re accused of not being civilized—or maybe nice which is what they often say about women—we don’t take them at their word. They’re mobilizing this against people in protest. The other thought I had about your conclusion is from the most recent Brené Brown and Adam Grant podcast about paradoxes. She suggests that we need always “gritty facts and gritty faith.” Our optimism has to be grounded in reality. We don’t survive without optimism, but we also don’t survive without the gritty truth.