"There's Evil Working Against Me, I'm the 3rd Victim" Mackenzie’s Jail Calls Released

This is the back half of the final part, covering the trial, the verdict and the recorded jail calls that went viral. The framing the Shirilla family has adopted in interviews is corruption: that the judge and the family of Dominic Russo, Mackenzie's boyfriend, are connected. The host takes that apart rather than repeating it. The judge and the Russos share a surname but are not related, and that has been established. Dom's mother Christine Russo did once work for the DA's office, but no longer does, and nothing links that to the trial. The one allegation the host says would genuinely matter — that interviews touching Mackenzie's POTS diagnosis were withheld in discovery — isn't the basis of the appeal and only surfaces in interviews. Her verdict on the POTS defense is that it was the defense's job to bring a medical expert; the opinions of the victim's relatives were never going to establish it.

The jail calls themselves are where the episode spends most of its time, and their consistent note is self-focus. Mackenzie asks her mother Natalie to contact a famous person to represent her, apparently Kim Kardashian, and to organize a protest. She speculates about how much money the judge made from the case and suggests looking for cash deposits, at which point Natalie reminds her the line is recorded. She wonders why she was kept alive if the outcome was prison, and lands on the idea that it is part of her story and material for a book she'll write. She pushes her mother to start a Facebook page; a page later exists, though the family says it isn't theirs. After the guilty verdict she says she is in shock — she had expected 85 years or life without parole and got 15 to life, served concurrently.

The victim-impact statements sit against all of that. Davion Flanagan was adopted with his two sisters out of foster care at eight and a half, was the team barber, tore his ACL in the third game of his senior season and lost the football scholarship he was chasing. His mother told the judge that he was 'so much more than cargo' and that he gave the world the love he most wanted himself. His sister Divine said she feels stuck, that he was the only person who had been with her since she was born. Christine Russo told the court she lost three children in the crash, and that the crying from the Shirilla side after the verdict was itself a lack of remorse. On a later jail call Mackenzie's response to those statements is that they were weird, and that she's worried about her belongings still at Dom's house.

Natalie Shirilla's plea before sentencing is the scene the hosts find hardest to defend: she uses her time to clear her own name over a social-media comment and a modeling post, explains that the family told Mackenzie to go to Halloween and the Kid Cudi concert, and is finally interrupted by the judge, who points out she is hearing a great deal about the daughter and very little about the two dead people. Since then the first appeal was rejected, a second was filed a day late with leap year offered as the explanation, and Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy declined to accept jurisdiction for the Ohio Supreme Court. The next real milestone is a parole hearing in 2037. The families are also pushing to update Ohio's Son of Sam law, which they say has not been extended to cover social media income.