Medical condition 'POTS' Mackenzie Shirilla blamed deadly 100mph crash on explained

Mackenzie Sharillla is serving life for slamming her car into a wall at 100mph, yet she maintains to this day that she never intended to kill her partner or his friend.

Shirilla, who was just 17 at the time, was the only survivor of a horror car crash that took the lives of Dominic Russo, 20, and Davion Flanagan 19, in July 2022.

Netflix’s The Crash re-examines the controversial case, featuring Sharilla’s first ever interview from prison alongside testimony from the prosecutor and the victims’ parents.

Shirilla has maintained her innocence and, in videos shown from court in the documentary, her mother Natalie claims the crash could actually have been caused by a debilitating and chronic health condition called ‘Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome’.

When you delve deeper into the case and the condition, however, it's clear why prosecutors doubted whether Shirilla actually had it, or that it played a part in the fatal crash.

POTS causes someone’s heart rate to beat faster than normal when they transition from sitting to standing up

As explained by the Cleveland Clinic, the best way to understand POTS is to break down each word of it; postural, which relates to the position or posture of your body, and orthostatic, a fancy way of saying it relates standing upright, and tachycardia, which means a heart rate of over 100 bpm.

Whilst your body’s nervous system normally balances your heart rate and blood pressure, POTS means that your body struggles to coordinate the ‘balancing act of blood vessel constriction and heart rate response’.

It is possible to pass out from POTS and, in some rare cases, people can even lose consciousness from prolonged sitting, as opposed to standing up suddenly.

Where prosecutors had an issue with Shirilla’s sequence of events, however, is in the idea that this happened to in the moments before her car hit the wall.

Key evidence from the car's ‘black box’

In court Natalie suggested that POTS may have caused her daughter to get light headed and pass out prior to the crash. Since the beginning, Mackenzie has claimed that she has no memory of the moments leading up to the collision.

However, this is questioned in the doc, with it being pointed out that the accelerator was locked at 100 percent the entire five seconds leading up the crash, with no attempt to break.

Mackenzie Shirilla is currently serving two concurrent sentences, with a minimum of 15 years and a maximum of life (Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction)

Speaking in court, her mum Natalie said that she was aware of Mackenzie’s ‘black outs’ when she allowed her to get a driving licence.

In the documentary assistant prosecutor Tim Troup says: “We were never provided an opinion from a medical [professional] stating that Mackenzie had suffered some kind of POTS incident which caused this. I think that’s because that’s not what happened.”

Dominic Russo’s sister says in the doc that it’s not possible because if she had a POTS incident, her foot would have actually eased off the gas.

Troup continues, saying: “Mackenzie drove that car… going up to 100mph this would have taken intense engagement with the steering and controls of that car, just because of the nature of the turns of the road.

“That is not a piece of road that someone could navigate at 100mph while black out.”

The Crash is available to stream on Netflix now.