A Stray Bullet Hit Her in the Shoulder While She Sat in Her Own Yard: Two Cases in Skopje in One Day

She was sitting in her own yard in Dracevo. Not on the street, not in some place where "these things happen". She was at home. At 20:40 she felt an impact in her shoulder, and an hour later, at the Dracevo clinic, doctors confirmed the wound came from a stray round fired from a weapon.

J.S., 57, from Skopje. That is everything the police bulletin tells us about her. What the bulletin does not tell us is whose bullet it was, where it came from, and what it was doing in the air above a Skopje neighbourhood on a Monday evening.

Same day, second case

That same day, at around 14:30, a 37-year-old woman from Gjorce Petrov reported to Skopje police that she had found a stray round outside her home. She was lucky - she found the bullet on the ground rather than in herself.

Two cases in a single day, in two different corners of the city. In both, the police announced that "measures are being taken to clear the matter up". That is the formula every citizen has heard hundreds of times and which, let us be honest, rarely turns into a news item about who it actually was.

Where are they falling from?

A stray bullet does not appear out of nowhere. Somebody fired it. The question is whether they fired at a wedding, at a celebration, at something this country has spent decade after decade treating as folklore rather than as a crime. A bullet fired into the air does not vanish - it comes down, and it comes down with enough force to go through a shoulder.

There is a law. There is also the practice of hearing bursts of gunfire over residential blocks every summer and every weekend, with nobody afterwards knowing where it came from. Between those two things there is a gap, and every time, a 57-year-old woman in her own yard can end up standing in it.

Two people from Skopje in one day. One in hospital, the other with a bullet outside her front door. If that is not reason enough for someone to start counting the ammunition flying over this city - what is?