Shyann Topping first noticed Mackenzie Shirilla shortly after she was transferred to the Ohio Reformatory for Women to begin serving her sentence after being convicted of murdering her boyfriend and friend.

“I walked up to her and said, ‘You look good,’” Topping tells PEOPLE of the pair’s first meeting on the outdoor track at the facility.

It was not long after that first encounter that the two began dating.

“When it started off we were good. We were just walking the track, she was smiling, because in prison —two weeks in prison feels like two months. All you’re doing is seeing the same people every single day, 24 hours a day,” Topping says.

By the second or third day of their relationship, Topping says Mackenzie told her: “Why aren’t you touching me? I want you to be all over me. I want you to be out here for everyone in the yard to see me.”

Topping says the two formed a very special and deep connection, but that unbeknownst to her, this relationship was also being built on a bed of lies.

The relationship continued even after Topping was released from prison, but quickly soured when she says she did her own research into the fatal crash that landed Mackenzie in prison.

Topping says she tried to ask Mackenzie questions but got few answers, and after learning that she had been misled about the details of the crash which killed Mackenzie’s boyfriend and their friend, she decided to post a series of videos on her TikTok account in August 2025 speaking about Mackenzie and effectively ending their relationship.

Shortly after that first video went live, Topping says she began to receive threats, doxing and texts which made her fear for her safety.

“It was crazy because after I found out [the details] of her case and we stopped talking to each other and it fizzled out, people started texting me and saying crazy stuff to me,” Topping tells PEOPLE.

She says that some of these texts were just her mother’s name or her home address.

Topping believes that inmates who were locked up with Mackenzie at the time were the ones sending the texts.

It was enough to scare Topping, who after posting the series of three videos in August 2025 did not post again until May 17, 2026, following the release of the Netflix documentary The Crash.

That documentary examines the volatile relationship between Mackenzie and her boyfriend Dominic Russo, who died on July 31, 2022 when Mackenzie, who was driving, crashed the car into a brick building at a speed of nearly 100 mph.

Prosecutors said at Mackenzie’s trial that it was a botched murder-suicide attempt that Mackenzie somehow managed to survive, though she and her parents, Natalie and Steve Shirilla, have long maintained her innocence and claimed she passed out behind the wheel because she suffers from a blood pressure disorder.

That was not the story Topping says she heard in prison from Mackenzie, however, who she claims led her to believe she was an innocent victim of a corrupt judicial system.

“When I was in [prison], I honestly believed maybe she’s not guilty because of the limited information I had,” explains Topping, who adds that she didn’t know about the crash prior to meeting Mackenzie because she was already behind bars.

Topping says she left prison ready to “fight for [Mackenzie’s] release” and “possibly be an advocate” for her cause, but it spoiled when the facts came to light.

“When I first got out [of prison] I was like, ‘Oh, they don’t know what this girl’s been through,’” Topping says, “And then I started going through everything and seeing the evidence and I started thinking about her and I realized, ‘Oh my God, maybe she’s not a good person.’”