A fifteen-year-old boy on a bicycle, hit by a car at an Ohrid intersection, is left seriously injured in hospital - and the driver flees the scene. This is not an abstract road-safety statistic; this is a child, and a man who chose to keep driving rather than stop and help.

The accident happened on 3 July at around 17:20, at the junction of "Makedonski Prosvetiteli" Boulevard and "Dimitar Vlahov" Street in Ohrid. The teenager was hospitalised with serious injuries at "St. Erasmo" hospital. Police later found the white Volkswagen Tiguan with Ohrid plates and detained the driver - a 65-year-old pensioner from Ohrid. A test showed 0.7 per mille of alcohol in his blood.

So behind the wheel sat a man who should not have been driving, who hit a child, and who - instead of staying - fled. Each of those three facts on its own is serious; together they paint a picture of a certain attitude toward other people's lives that, sadly, is no rarity here. How many times have we read the same sentence with a different street name?

The investigation is led by Ohrid police on the public prosecutor's orders, and the driver will answer for leaving the scene of an accident causing serious bodily harm. The court will have its say, but the question that lingers is bigger than one case: what makes a driver of that age, with alcohol in his blood, think that fleeing is an option? Part of the answer lies in how often such a getaway passes without any real consequence. A boy is fighting for his life in hospital; the least we owe him is a system that doesn't treat him as one more line in the daily police bulletin.