OLD TOWN — Two summers ago, when Ramaine Hill was shot near his home in the old Cabrini-Green neighborhood, his aunt talked to him before he went into surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
"Auntie, I almost didn't make it," Joyce Taybron remembers him saying in 2011.
Hill, 22, was shot again Saturday afternoon, this time fatally in the head, near Division and Orleans streets.
On this trip to Northwestern, Taybron wasn't able to talk to the man she helped raised.
"He was always concerned about his well-being," said Taybron. "He was scared every day of his life."
Hill — described by family as a quiet father of a 2-year-old and a graduate of Lincoln Park High School — was pronounced dead at 10:08 p.m. Sunday, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.
He had helped put the man who shot him the first time behind bars, family said. Since he named the person who shot him to authorities, Hill had been terrorized by local gang members who wanted him dead, family members said.
"They've been after him ever since he was shot," his brother Nijajuan Hill, 21, said.
"I don't know who told them they were God, but I'd hang them all and make them slowly feel the death they brought to him," Taybron said in her Old Town home.
Police couldn't confirm details of the first shooting and have not offered motives in Saturday's slaying.
Born and raised in Cabrini-Green, Hill was one of nine brothers and sisters and was an active participant in By The Hand, an organization which seeks to keep youth out of trouble.
Hill remained in the neighborhood of his youth, even after he was shot in 2011 dropping off a girlfriend at her home. He was not the target in that shooting, his family said.
The same year he was shot, Hill became a father to Ramaine Jr.
"When his son is here, he feeds him, he bathes him, he clothes him," Taybron said. "He wasn't ready to be a father, but he became a good father."
The elder Ramaine dreamed of getting a job in the neighborhood that replaced the once notorious public housing project.
After the Apple Store in Lincoln Park opened just minutes away from his home in 2010, "He would practically live there and submit applications constantly," Taybron said.
For the last few months, Hill worked at the meat counter at the Jewel-Osco, 1210 N. Clark St.
Family said when Hill was shot Saturday, he was walking to work a few hours earlier than normal.
After the shooting Saturday, witnesses watched the scene behind yellow tape, inches away from a black backpack they said belonged to Hill.
One woman who was sitting in her car a few feet from where Hill was shot heard three shots, but "I thought they were firecrackers, since this neighborhood has changed so much," she said.
The woman, who declined to be named, said the shooter was wearing dark clothing, but police said the gunman was wearing red clothes.
The old Cabrini-Green area was nationally known as a hot spot for violence before the high-rises were torn down in the last decade. Cabrini-Green row houses remain south of Division Street.
The shooting was not far from the island of vice known as "Sedville," a Mickey Cobras street gang-controlled area that has previously been a gang battle zone.
Tasha Mitchell, who has lived in the neighborhood for nine years, held her baby daughter and watched as police worked the scene.
She complained that pockets of Old Town see steady violence which she said is ignored by the rest of the city.
"There's a lot of killing going on. It's crazy, and they're getting away with it," she said.
Mitchell blamed the shootings on gangs in the neighborhood.
"They don't care who they shoot," Mitchell said. "And it's in broad daylight now?"
At least two people have been killed in the old Cabrini-Green area so far this year, according to DNAinfo Chicago data.
"It's very upsetting," Taybron said. "They've got all these people living in fear."
Contributing: Kyla Gardner and Quinn Ford.
