Taxi drivers wouldn't take bleeding Petar to hospital to keep their cars clean. All except Stefan

Left - Stefan; right - Petar/ Photo: Private archive

The unwritten journalistic rule that it's not news when dog bites man, but vice versa, could be applied to what happened in Petrovac na Mlavi. It's not so much the news that a young man came to the aid of another,  injured 20-year-old Petar Bogdanovic, as much that several others wouldn't.

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Stefan Djelovic was the only taxi driver in this town who helped a young man he didn't not know in center of the town on Sunday morning. Bogdanovic had been attacked that morning and sustained two stab wounds to the leg.

As Stefan told Telegraf.rs, he spoke with the injured young man last night. He had been transferred from Petrovac to Belgrade and is due to leave the hospital on Thursday.

Stefan Djelovic; Photo: Private archive

20 seconds later would have been too late

"The surgeon in Petrovac told him that if he arrived 20 seconds later, he would have bled to death. Since some taxi drivers refused to transport him, he wanted go on foot across the bridge to the hospital, but if he managed to do that he probably wouldn't have made it to the other side of the bridge, the doctor told him that he would have died from that effort," says Stefan, who works for Grand Taxi.

Still, Stefan sees nothing special in his own actions.

"The heart of the problem is that some of my colleagues are not good people and I'm frustrated by it. It's not so much the news that I helped the guy, the news is that they didn't. To me, coming to his aid is the most normal thing there is."

"Petar spent seven, eight minutes speaking with taxi drivers, three of them from three companies rejected him. One threw him out of the car because he was bleeding, another told him to not even think about approaching his car, a third did something similar," Stefan says, adding that a vein in Bogdanovic's leg was cut in the attack, which made him bleed profusely.

A short ride saved a life

According to him, their ride from the downtown to the hospital did not take much longer than 30 seconds.

"I tried to talk to him, but he was already fading away from the loss of blood. I handed him to the doctors and stayed in the emergency service until the police arrived," says Stefan.

According to Ptinfo,the police in Petrovac have detained N.S. and P.V. from Svilajnac for their involvement in the attack on Petar Bogdanovic. He was allegedly stabbed by S.V. after a brief altercation. The attacker then fled the scene.

(J.V.)