The Text Messages Between McKenzie Sharilla and Dominic Russo That Changed Everything

Before the crash. Before the courtroom. Before the Netflix documentary. There were the texts — tens of thousands of them — and they tell a story that no one who reads them can easily forget.

A Relationship Built on Chaos

McKenzie Sharilla and Dominic Russo met as teenagers. By the time of the July 31st, 2022 crash that killed Dom and their friend DaVon Flanigan, the two had exchanged what investigators compiled as over 93,000 text messages — a digital record of a relationship that swung wildly between affection and hostility, breakups and reconciliations, for years.

A Cellebrite cell phone extraction going back to January 2020 revealed the full picture. Sharilla, who was 17 at the time of the crash, had been convicted in a bench trial of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, and additional charges. She was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole beginning in 2037.

She has always maintained she blacked out. The texts tell a different story — or at least, a more complicated one.

“I Just Want to Bang My Head on the Wall Till I’m Dead”

Early messages from 2020 show a pattern that would repeat for years: Sharilla wanting more of Dom’s time, Dom pulling back, and the fallout escalating fast. When Dom told her to go home after school one afternoon, Sharilla erupted in all caps. When he said he felt smothered, she responded with a message about wanting to hurt herself.

By the summer of 2021, the tone had shifted further. Sharilla’s messages grew more controlling — setting timers, demanding responses, threatening to block him if he didn’t comply within minutes. Dom, for his part, oscillated between wanting out and pulling her back.

Four Weeks Before the Crash

In early July 2022, Dom sent a message that now reads as painfully prophetic. He told Sharilla he loved her, but that the relationship wasn’t working — that it was a breakup fight every week, that neither of them deserved it. “There isn’t very much time on earth,” he wrote.

Hours later, he was asking if they could work things out.

Two weeks after that, witnesses say Sharilla threatened to crash the car while Dom was on the phone with her. The texts that followed spiraled into accusations from both sides about who had tried to harm whom.

Dom’s final message in the compiled record came the night before he died.

What the Texts Don’t Answer

Sharilla’s attorneys pointed to messages where she described herself as the victim — Dom allegedly grabbing the steering wheel, Dom allegedly threatening her. Prosecutors pointed to everything else.

The judge sided with the prosecution. Sharilla is currently serving her sentence. The Netflix documentary The Crash brought the case back into public conversation — but the texts, all 93,000 of them, have been available the whole time.