Nikola Makračevski was 19. On 7 August, around midday, he was riding a Kawasaki motorcycle along Radišanska Street. He was going straight. He was not turning, not overtaking, not doing anything prosecutors would later name as his mistake. What killed him came from the other side of the junction.

According to the Skopje Basic Public Prosecutor's Office, a 46-year-old driver of a Seat Altea turned left at the junction with Street 18 - a junction where traffic is not regulated by signs - without giving way to vehicles coming from the opposite direction. In doing so he cut off the motorcyclist.

What followed was physics with no way out. To avoid a head-on hit with the car that had planted itself in front of his wheels, Makračevski swerved left, into the oncoming lane. There, with the front of his bike, he hit an Alfa Romeo coming the other way. The force threw him off the motorcycle and onto the road. He died of severe injuries. The Alfa Romeo driver was lightly injured.

Then came the part that is not an accident

A traffic collision is an accident. Leaving the scene is not. Instead of helping the injured, the suspect left. Police caught him the same day, at around 19:40. So seven and a half hours passed between a nineteen-year-old lying on the asphalt and the man who caused it being detained.

Prosecutors are pursuing him in summary proceedings on two counts: serious offences against the safety of people and property in traffic, and failing to assist a person injured in a traffic accident. The prosecutor proposed precautionary measures - a ban on leaving his place of residence, an obligation to report to the court, temporary seizure of his travel document and confiscation of his driving licence.

A junction with no signs, in a city with cameras on every corner

There is one detail in the statement worth reading twice: the junction of Radišanska and Street 18 is not regulated by traffic signs. It is not that a sign was overlooked or hidden behind a branch. There is no sign.

Who answers for that? Not the driver - a court will judge him for what he did. The question is for the people who have spent years planning and maintaining Skopje's traffic signage: how many junctions like this are left, and how many of them will get a sign only after someone dies there. The precautionary measures for the driver were set within days. A sign at one intersection has been waiting longer than a young man's entire life.

The measures the prosecutor requested are standard and sensible. What is missing is an answer to why, in a city investing in surveillance systems and road-safety campaigns, someone can still turn left at an unmarked junction and kill a man - and then get back in the car and drive on.