At around 1:50 after midnight, at the football stadium in the Gostivar village of Raven, a police officer fell into an open and unmarked concrete shaft roughly a metre and a half deep. He sustained serious bodily injuries, confirmed at the Medical Centre in Gostivar.

He was not there by chance. He was working the scene.

What came before

On 21 September at around 23:15, a 45-year-old woman from Raven reported to Gostivar police that her husband A.A. (60) had left for work in Gostivar at around 7am, had not come home, and was not answering his phone.

After the measures taken, A.A. was found dead at around 00:20 on 22 September, at the village football stadium. A chainsaw was found nearby. Death was confirmed by a doctor from the Gostivar emergency centre.

The scene was examined in the presence of a public prosecutor, a forensic medical examiner, a forensics team from Gostivar police and members of the Gostivar Territorial Fire Unit.

During those official activities, one of them fell into the shaft.

Open and unmarked

Those two words in the police report carry the whole weight of it.

A shaft a metre and a half deep, at a public sports facility in a village, at night. No cover. No marking. No fence. This is not a construction site under a temporary regime with tape around it - this is a football stadium, a place where the village children run about during the day.

The officer had a torch, he had a team around him, and he had reason to watch where he stepped. He fell anyway. A child with a ball has none of those three.

The question the police bulletin does not ask

The police report describes the injury as an event during an official activity. That is accurate but incomplete. The injury did not happen because of the scene examination - it happened because of the shaft.

Who maintains that stadium? When did anyone last walk around it and check for open holes? How long has that shaft been sitting there without a cover, and did anybody even know about it?

Not one of those questions will be answered in the investigation into A.A.'s death, because these are two separate stories that met by chance on that pitch, over the course of one night.

In the second story there is only one step somebody should have taken: cover the hole. It needs no budget, no strategy, no European funds. It needs one cover and one person to put it on.

When that does not happen, instead of a cover we get a seriously injured police officer and a piece of public property still standing open - until the next person walks across it.