Before Mackenzie Shirilla became the subject of Netflix’s number-one documentary The Crash, she was living within a broader cultural script: teenagerhood as a relatively new social category, loaded with adult privileges and stripped of adult duties.
That is the uncomfortable backdrop behind the crime that rocked Strongsville, Ohio. Watching personal camera footage of Shirilla and her boyfriend, Dominic Russo, was surreal. I rode that same Ferris wheel at that same town carnival, maybe even in that exact gondola, suspended above that city and dreaming about a future with the man I would marry, overlooking his hometown. Shirilla’s parents and friends describe her as just another girl: young, in love and building a future. The truth is the wheels were coming off Shirilla’s life long before she ran a car into a building at 100 mph, killing two men, including her Ferris Wheel partner.
The Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals affirmed Shirilla’s convictions in 2024, citing evidence that she made a controlled turn, floored the accelerator, never pressed the brake, and had no medical or mechanical explanation that accounted for the crash. The court record included testimony that Shirilla had previously threatened to crash a car with Russo inside. Her social media accounts depicted a girl drawn to drug use, edge, and performance.
Teenagerhood itself is not fundamentally flawed. Postwar prosperity gave young Americans a degree of leisure, privacy, and consumer power that earlier generations did not always have. That privilege can be used well. It can give young people the opportunity to study, work, compete, serve, mature, and prepare for adult life.
By 2022–2023, one in four U.S. females ages 15–19 was currently using contraception, and among sexually experienced teen girls, earlier CDC data show contraception is nearly universal as a lifetime experience. Teenagers have been handed many of the technologies of adult sexuality long before they have been formed in the duties that ought to govern it.
Dr. Viktor Frankl warned that freedom degenerates into arbitrariness unless it is lived as responsibility. Pew research found that only 67% of 12th graders expected to marry someday by 2023, down from 80% in 1993; among girls, the figure fell from 83% to 61%. This is a warning that permanence has become harder for the young to imagine.
Millennial women know the glossy version of this bargain. My So-Called Life, The O.C., Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars gave us teenage worlds thick with beauty, secrets, wealth and romance. They can be fun, stylish, and narratively compelling, but they make terrible finishing schools.
Parents can watch fictional portrayals of moral disorder among teenagers and turn them into conversation. There is a difference between consuming a story and being catechized by it. In those fictional universes, parents are often absent, compromised, indulgent, hypocritical, or narratively irrelevant. Teenagers get the mansions, cars, bodies, secrets, bedrooms, drugs, sex, wardrobes, and emotional monologues. Adults arrive late, offer little authoritative guidance, and provide the safety net only when the storyline needs rescue. It is a world of social power without proportionate duty. Mackenzie Shirilla lives this convenient scripting as a reality.
That pattern did not begin with TikTok or Netflix. By the 1950s, teenagers were already being treated as a distinct consumer category; Seventeen magazine even packaged marketing research around a composite teenage girl called “Teena.” Commerce got to the teenage girl before formation did.
Then came the extended runway. Pew found that 29% of adults ages 25 to 29 were married in 2023, compared with 50% in 1993; only 27% of adults ages 30 to 34 had a child in their household, compared with 60% 30 years earlier. Pew also found that nearly half of U.S. teens were online “almost constantly” in 2024. A generation can rehearse adulthood for years while postponing the institutions that end the rehearsal.
The documentary shows Shirilla making TikToks from a hospital bed and includes a discussion of her and her mother pursuing modeling opportunities shortly after the crash. Russo’s sister, Christine, has said Shirilla was “obsessed with herself and being social media famous.” For Shirilla, even tragedy is content.
The “It Girl” was supposed to be free. Too often, she is merely unformed: watched, followed, styled, photographed, monetized, and indulged. She is trained to narrate herself before she has been taught to govern herself. She learns marketable angles before virtues.
Parents do not have to become fundamentalist scolds to see the danger. Joyless media prohibition will not form a child’s conscience. Some fictional works are worth watching precisely because they let parents and teenagers discuss moral failure at a distance. The problems start when aesthetic rebellion becomes social instruction, when parents outsource interpretation under the guise of trusting their child. Shirilla’s parents supported her moving in with Dom at seventeen years old, also supporting her marijuana use and high-risk behavior.
A wiser culture would teach girls that beauty is not authority. A following is not a soul. Attention is not love. Volatility is not proof of depth. A boyfriend is not a possession. A car is not a prop.
Adults who spend decades treating drama as authenticity, privacy as maturity, attention as achievement, and consequences as cruelty show up woefully unprepared when tragedy strikes or, worse, is induced by their own child.
There is no writers’ room in a courtroom.
For more on this topic, check out this episode of Rebranding Motherhood.
Jillian Tymo is a researcher, writer, and host of the podcast Rebranding Motherhood produced by ProLove Ministries. She examines culture, politics, and religion through her work and academic studies at Georgetown University.