When Veronica Crowder unexpectedly ran into her younger brother, she warned him to “stay off” the streets.

 

“Stay off these street corners — don’t be standing out here unless you want to go back to jail,” Crowder said she told Nathaniel T. Jackson when she bumped into him at a bus stop a month ago.

 

Crowder said she didn’t realize Jackson was out of prison until the two met that day.

 

“He said, ‘Hey Sis, how you been?’ ” a tearful Crowder recalled a day after the 40-year-old man was fatally shot and became the city’s 500th homicide of 2012.

 

Police found Jackson shot multiple times -- including in the head -- outside a convenience store in the 4900 block of West Augusta Boulevard about 9 p.m. Thursday, authorities said. Jackson, of the 4700 block of West Armitage Avenue, was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:18 a.m., the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office said.

 

Jackson was a gang member, a police source said. He leaves behind a daughter and a grandson, according to Crowder.

 

The last year the city’s homicide total reached 500 was in 2008, which saw 512 murders, according to Chicago Police Department records. There were 435 homicides in 2011, according to city records. The city surpassed that total in October.

 

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