An Attorney Convicted of Attempted Murder at a Restaurant Opening, Kimberly Sullivan Rejects Two Plea Deals, Mackenzie Shirilla's Last Door

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. Yesterday, we put the Lindsay Clancy case down until Judge Sullivan reconvenes on September 29th. Today, we go find out what happened everywhere else while all of us were staring at Plymouth County. And that is worth a word on its own. For six weeks, this show and most of this industry pointed everything it had at one courtroom in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, trials started and ended.

0:46 People were convicted. People were sentenced. And appeals died quietly in places where nobody was filming. Because three cases moved and every one of them turns on a decision somebody made that they will be living with for a very long time. In Toledo, Ohio, a jury convicted an attorney of attempted murder for walking into a restaurant on its opening night and pointing a loaded handgun at his ex-wife across a dinner table. The reason more people are not dead is a waiter who tackled him. And the defendant spent the last day of his own trial getting removed from the courtroom for shouting at the prosecutor. In Waterbury, Connecticut, a woman accused of locking her stepson in a room for 20 years was offered two different plea deals. She turned both of them down and told a judge she wants a jury. That means a man who weighed 68 pounds when firefighters carried him out of a burning house is going to testify. And in Ohio, the state Supreme Court just permanently closed the door on Mackenzie Sherilla. Not because her claims were weak, because her lawyers filed a document one day late. And part of the reason appears to be that somebody did not account for a leap year.

1:54 Let's get into it. On April 11th of 2025, a restaurant called Sabira opened for business in the warehouse district of Toledo, Ohio. The staff had rehearsed. They had done soft openings. As the prosecutor put it to the jury, they had prepared for everything except what came through the door. Matthew Exton is 43 years old, and until last year, he was a practicing attorney with law offices in Ohio and in Michigan. He had been divorced, and he and his ex-wife were still fighting over marital property. That evening he was downtown, early to meet a friend. He stopped at a bar and a restaurant next door. And then he saw his former in-law's truck parked outside and saw his ex-wife and her parents seated at a table at Sabira on opening night. By his own account, he went in, sat at the bar, had a drink, sent a drink over to their table, went outside, and smoked a cigarette.

2:52 Then he came back in with a Colt handgun and walked to their table. His ex-wife started screaming and a waiter who had rehearsed for a restaurant opening and not for this ran at a man holding a gun and tackled him. Other employees and diners piled in and wrestled the weapon away. Prosecutors told the jury the safety was never disengaged and that this is the reason three people are alive. The prosecutor said that waiter saved at least three lives that day. Matthew Exton pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and three counts of felonious assault. He had earlier tried to raise an insanity defense. A judge reviewed a doctor's report in May and denied it. The Ohio Supreme Court suspended his law license in May of last year.

3:37 The trial started a week ago Tuesday in Lucas County in front of seven women and five men. And on Thursday, Matthew Exton did what defense lawyers almost never let a client do. He took the stand in his own defense. He told the jury about the divorce. He said he had been homeless afterward, living out of the trunk of his car or on a friend's couch. He said it was terrible, it was painful, and that he had no safe space. And then he admitted the central fact. He told the jury he pointed the gun at his ex-wife. What he disputed was intent. He said he never aimed at her parents, never took the safety off, never pulled the trigger. Then prosecutors cross-examined him, and it fell apart.

4:22 He told them the victims had been laughing at him that day. He said they knew what they were doing to him. And then he said the sentence that I suspect ended his case. I didn't want them to die, but I was fighting for my life. Sit with that construction for a second, because it is the whole problem. He was not fighting for his life. He was standing over a table at a restaurant opening holding a gun on three people who were eating dinner. What he was fighting was a property dispute and a feeling, and he said it out loud under oath in front of 12 people who had just heard a waiter describe running at a firearm. Friday was closing arguments, and Matthew Exton, who is a lawyer, who has stood in courtrooms for a living, would not stop interrupting. As the prosecutor described what happened, he shouted over her. Reporters in the room described him calling out about a gun and using his hands to imitate one. The judge removed him from his own trial.

5:21 He was taken to another room in the courthouse where he could watch and listen to a video feed but could not interrupt. He was not in the room when the verdict came. The jury convicted him of attempted murder, two counts of felonious assault, and multiple firearm specifications. They acquitted him on one remaining felonious assault count, which tells you they were reading the charges carefully rather than voting on a feeling. The Lucas County prosecuting attorney said afterward that the employees and patrons who stepped in to stop the defendant that day are heroes. She is right, and I want to be specific about why. That waiter had no obligation to do that. Nothing in the job description of a person carrying plates on an opening night covers charging a man with a pistol. Every instinct that keeps people alive says, get behind something. He did the other thing, and three people went home. Accountability doesn't have a legal department.

6:16 Sometimes it is a guy in an apron who decides, in about a second and a half, that this is not happening in his restaurant. Sentencing is set for later this month, and the firearm specifications matter there. In Ohio, those are mandatory add-on terms that stack on top of the underlying sentence. So an attempted murder conviction with multiple gun specifications is not a case where a judge has much room to be generous. There is one more thing worth saying about Matthew Exton. and it has nothing to do with sympathy. He is a lawyer. He has spent his professional life in courtrooms, standing next to people at the worst moment of their lives, telling them to stay calm and let him do the talking. He knew exactly what interrupting a prosecutor's closing argument would do to a jury.

7:01 He knew what taking the stand would expose him to. And he did all of it anyway, because by that point, the person in the courtroom least able to see the situation clearly was the one with the law degree. I am not naming his ex-wife or her parents on this show. She survived an attempted murder. She is a private person. And she has done nothing but eat dinner. She and her parents will be identified in the court record, and they do not need it from us. But I want to say the other thing, because this is a domestic violence case, and it deserves to be called one. This was not a man who snapped. He saw a truck, went inside, had a drink, sent a drink to the table, went out for a cigarette, and came back with a gun.

7:42 That is a sequence of decisions with pauses built into it, and at every pause, he could have gone home. When we come back, a woman turns down two plea offers and bets everything on a jury. On February 17th of 2025, firefighters were called to a house on Blake Street in Waterbury, Connecticut. The fire had been set on purpose. It was set by a man in his 30s who lived in that house using printer paper, hand sanitizer, and a lighter. Police say he set it because it was the only way he could think of to get somebody to come. When they got him out, he weighed 68 pounds. The arrest warrant describes a man who was extremely emaciated, whose hair was matted, who was dirty, and whose teeth appeared to be rotted. He is identified in court papers only as S.

8:40 He is now in his 30s. And he says he was locked inside a room in that house from the age of 11 for roughly two decades and given very little food. Do the math on that with me. If he is right, then he went into that room around the year 2004 and came out in 2025. He was a child when it started. He missed all of it. Every year of school after fifth grade, every job, every friendship, every ordinary stupid thing a person does between 11 and 30. And the way it ended was that he set the house on fire because he had worked out that the only people guaranteed to come to that address were firefighters. His stepmother is Kimberly Sullivan, who is 57. She was arrested the following month and charged with two counts of first-degree kidnapping, first-degree assault, first-degree unlawful restraint, and cruelty to persons.

9:32 If convicted, she faces more than 45 years. She is denied all of it. According to the warrant, she told police she never locked him in, that his door was not locked, and that he had free reign of the house. She has been free on a $ 300, 000 bond since the day after her arrest. On Friday, this case reached the moment that decides everything. In July, two separate plea offers were put on the table. The state offered 30 years, suspended after 20 years, served, followed by five years of probation. Then the judge did something judges are permitted to do in Connecticut and offered her a better one. 30 years, suspended after 10, plus five years probation, 10 years. That was the floor. On Friday, she stood in court and rejected both of them. I want you to understand the arithmetic she just turned down because it is stark. Take the judge's offer and you serve 10 years and you are out. Go to trial and lose and you are facing more than 45. That is a 35-year swing on a single decision made in a single morning. Her attorney, Ioannis Kaloitis, has been consistent from the start. He has called the offers a non-starter and said his client has done nothing wrong. He said in July that he does not anticipate this case resolving with anything that involves incarceration.

10:51 The judge did the thing judges have to do in that moment. He confirmed she understood that by choosing trial over the offer, she may never get another chance at a deal. She said she understood. Now, I want to be very careful here, and I want to explain why this is a genuinely difficult moment rather than an obvious one. Kimberly Sullivan is presumed innocent. She has not been convicted of anything. If she is telling the truth, if she truly did nothing wrong, then accepting 10 years in prison for something she did not do would be a catastrophe. And refusing that deal is the only honorable thing available to her. Innocent people take pleas in this country every single day because the math is terrifying. And that is one of the ugliest facts about our system. So no, I am not going to stand here and tell you she should have taken it. That is not a call anybody outside her situation gets to make. What I will tell you is what it means. It means there is going to be a trial. A hearing on pretrial motions is set for October 20th in front of a different judge who will actually preside. Jury selection could begin as early as January with trial in February. Her attorney has said the plan was always to reject and that his client is innocent. There was also a small housekeeping item Friday that tells you where things stand. The court agreed to remove one of the monitoring devices she has been wearing, but kept the GPS unit in place on the probation office's recommendation. She reports once a month so it can

12:21 be inspected. And in a separate proceeding, a probate court has blocked the sale of the Blake Street house. And it means that for the first time, the public is going to hear from S. His attorney said Friday that the rejection was expected and that S plans to attend the trial and testify. Think about what that requires of him. A man who says he spent 20 years locked in a room, who was carried out of a burning house at 68 pounds 18 months ago, is going to sit in a witness box in front of the woman he says did it, and be cross-examined about all of it by an attorney whose job is to suggest he is wrong. That is not a small thing to ask of anybody.

13:01 He is choosing to do it. And understand what a trial means for the state's case. They have a warrant describing a man at 68 pounds. They have firefighters and police who were in that house. But the person who can say what happened inside that room for 20 years is him. And a defense attorney is going to spend days suggesting that his memory is unreliable, that the door was never locked, and that he could have walked out at any time. The state offered 10 years partly to avoid putting him through that. She said no. There is one more detail about this case that I have not been able to stop thinking about. At every one of Kimberly Sullivan's court appearances, a woman has shown up who has no connection to any of it. She has been writing letters to S. She does not know whether he has received any of them. She just keeps showing up.

13:51 We do not know how S is doing. His lawyers have declined to discuss his physical or mental condition, which is exactly right. He has not been named and he will not be named here. But somebody in Waterbury noticed that a man spent two decades with nobody paying attention to him and decided that was not going to be true anymore. That's not a mistake. That's a choice. And it is the good kind. When we come back, an appeal dies over a single day and possibly over a leap year. Dominic Russo was 20 years old. Davian Flanagan was 19. On July 31st of 2022 in Strongsville, Ohio, they were passengers in a Toyota Camry driven by Mackenzie Sherilla, who was 17 and was Russo's girlfriend. That car accelerated to nearly 100 miles an hour on a suburban street and drove into a brick building. There was no braking before impact. Both young men were killed. Sharila waived a jury and was tried by a judge who convicted her in 2023 of four counts of murder, four counts of felonious assault, and two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide. She was sentenced in August of that year to two concurrent terms of 15 years to life. She is at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. She is 21 now.

15:21 Her first parole hearing is scheduled for 2037. She has always maintained the crash was not intentional and says she does not remember it. Last week, the Ohio Supreme Court closed her last door at the state level, and the way it happened should bother you regardless of what you think she did. Here is the sequence. After her conviction, Sharila's lawyers filed what is called a petition for post-conviction relief. That is the vehicle you use to raise things a direct appeal cannot reach, and hers raised too. The first was ineffective assistance of counsel. The second was medical. Her attorneys pointed to a condition called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, POTS, and argued it could support the possibility that she lost consciousness before that car hit the building. Their claim is that her trial lawyers never adequately investigated it. Now, I have no idea whether that argument is any good. Prosecutors think it is worthless. A judge who watched her trial convicted her of intentional murder based on surveillance video and vehicle data showing a car at 100 miles an hour with no brakes. But here's the thing. No court has ever ruled on whether that argument is any good. Not one.

16:33 Because Ohio gives you 365 days from when your trial transcripts are filed and her attorneys filed on October 24th, 2024, prosecutors say the deadline was October 23rd. One day. And according to her own legal team, part of the reason they missed it is that they failed to account for 2024 being a leap year. That is the entire case. Two young men are dead, a woman is serving 15 to life, and the question of whether her lawyer did his job will never be examined by any court in the state of Ohio because somebody's calendar had 365 days in it and the year had 366. Her new attorneys made a real legal argument about this. They pointed out that her transcripts arrived in two pieces. The main trial record came first, and a separate transcript from her juvenile bind-over hearing came weeks later, and they argued the clock should run from the later one. They also argued that different Ohio districts calculate this deadline differently, which means a defendant's filing deadline depends on which part of the state they happen to be in, and that this violates equal protection.

17:44 The 8th District Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in March. The Ohio Supreme Court declined to take the case on June 23rd. Justice Patrick DeWine dissented alone. Her lawyers asked the court to reconsider. Prosecutors responded by asking what new issue she was raising and answering it themselves, none. They suggested her time would be better spent lobbying politicians and wrote that creating a Sherilla-specific exception is a matter for Broad Street, not Front Street. Broad Street is where the Ohio legislature sits. Front Street is where the court sits. It is a good line. It is also, I think, an evasion dressed as restraint. Last week, Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy denied the motion in a single sentence. It is ordered by the court that the motion for reconsideration in this case is denied. No reasonings. This time, two justices dissented rather than one, with Justice Jennifer Brunner joining DeWine. Look, I'm going to be honest with you about where I land, and it is not where people expect me to land.

18:53 I have no sympathy for what happened in Strongsville. A judge heard that evidence and concluded she drove that car into a wall on purpose, and two families buried children who got into a vehicle with somebody they trusted. And I still think this is wrong. Deadlines exist for good reasons. Cases have to end. Victims' families deserve finality. Nobody is entitled to relitigate forever. But a rule that says a claim about whether your lawyer failed you cannot even be looked at because that same lawyer's office was one day late is a rule that punishes the defendant for the exact failure she is trying to raise. That is circular in a way that should embarrass the people defending it.

19:34 And the equal protection point is not frivolous. If a filing that is timely in one Ohio district is untimely in another, then the deadline is not a rule. It is a lottery. Two of seven justices saw a problem. Five did not. That is the system working exactly as designed, and I think it produced a bad outcome, and both of those things are true at once. I would also note who this rule catches. Mackenzie Sherilla had lawyers, appellate lawyers, new lawyers, and a case famous enough to draw a streaming documentary. If a deadline can swallow her claim, consider what it does every day to a defendant with an overworked public defender and no cameras anywhere near him. Almost nobody in that situation gets a Chief Justice writing them a sentence. And here's the part that makes me want to put my head through a wall. This case has been a Netflix documentary. It has been episodes of at least two other true crime series. Millions of people have watched something about Mackenzie Sherilla and formed a firm opinion about her. Almost none of them know that her post-conviction claims were never heard by anybody. Almost none of them know why. There is not a documentary about a filing deadline because a filing deadline does not cut together well over music. That is the part of this industry, our industry, that I keep circling back to. The dramatic parts get 12 hours of coverage. The parts that actually determine whether

21:05 a system is fair get a one-sentence order from a chief justice and no explanation at all. Dominic Russo was 20 years old. Davion Flanagan was 19. Flanagan was described by prosecutors as an unintended victim, a kid who happened to be in the car. They have been dead for four years. Someone has to say their names. That's the show for Tuesday, September 8th. If this was useful, send it to one person. That is the whole engine on a show like this. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment about the Ohio case. Should a missed deadline kill a claim that a defense lawyer failed his client when it is that same lawyer's office that missed it?

21:50 I know where I come down and I would like to know where you do. Tomorrow we keep catching up. Brian Koberger's motion to remove the judge who sentenced him is pending. Barry Morphew has a bond hearing. And a surgeon in Florida goes on trial next week with no lawyer and no jury. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing on the Toledo case. Matthew Exton was convicted Friday of attempted murder, two counts of felonious assault, and firearm specifications, and was acquitted on one count of felonious assault. Sentencing has not yet occurred, and he retains the right to appeal. Our accounts of his testimony and of his removal from the courtroom comes from reporters present in the room. We have chosen not to name his ex-wife or her parents. They are surviving victims and private individuals.

22:38 They are identifiable in the court record. and naming them here serves no purpose. On the Connecticut case, Kimberly Sullivan has pleaded not guilty, has denied the allegations, and is presumed innocent. The description of the victim's condition when he was rescued comes from the arrest warrant, which contains the state's allegations rather than findings by any court. The victim is identified in court papers only by an initial, and we have not named him. Reporting has varied on his exact age and on Sullivan. and on whether he has been described as 32 or 33. We have used approximations. No trial date has been set. On the Ohio case, Mackenzie Sherilla's conviction and sentence stand. Her post-conviction claims, including the claim of ineffective assistance of counsel and the medical argument involving Potts, have never been evaluated on their merits by any court, and nothing in this episode should be taken as a suggestion that they are meritorious. The explanation involving a leap year comes from her own legal team's filings.

23:42 Her earlier direct appeal challenging the sufficiency of the evidence was separately rejected. This episode discusses domestic violence, prolonged abuse and confinement, and the deaths of young people. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available around the clock at 1-800-799-7233. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.