A 26-year-old man was trying to protect his younger brother when he was fatally shot in St. Paul on Thursday, a relative said Friday.

Robert Molin Jr.’s 19-year-old brother walked to a store near the family’s home and “was confronted by a bunch of guys” who beat him up, said Portia Traxler, a first cousin of Molin’s mother and who said family members told her what happened.

Molin’s brother returned home to tell his family what occurred. Molin grabbed his father’s car keys, drove to “see what was going on or why these guys — whoever they were — beat his brother up and that’s when they shot him,” Traxler said.

Molin was shot at 2:20 p.m. in the area of Maryland and Prosperity avenues. He died about 90 minutes later at Regions Hospital.

Police said early Friday afternoon that no one has been arrested in Molin’s homicide. Anyone with information is asked to call the homicide unit at 651-266-5650.

Traxler said her cousin “did not deserve” what happened to him and she urged anyone with information to come forward.

“It’s not going to stop unless people say something and stop being scared,” she said. “It’s just really bold for them to do that in the middle of the daytime, right in front of the BCA (Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension), like they don’t even care anymore.”

Molin’s father and his younger brother and sister ran after him on Thursday.

Afterward, his teenage sister told about the horror of seeing him gravely injured. She kept saying, “My brother was laying on the ground with a hole in his head,” Traxler recalled.

HE WAS DAD TO A 3-YEAR-OLD, ABOUT TO START A NEW JOB

Molin, who grew up in the Twin Cities, was a hard-working man who was dedicated to his younger siblings and his 3-year-old daughter, Traxler said.

“All he wanted to do is be with his daughter, take care of her,” she said.

He was going to start a job on Monday as a FedEx deliveryman and he was so proud he passed the road test that he recently posted a photo of himself in his uniform, according to Traxler.

People called him “Little Bob” since he and his father have the same name.

“He was a jokester who liked to make people laugh,” Traxler remembered Friday. “He was always cracking jokes.”

The difficulty of losing Molin was made worse by what happened 18 years ago, Traxler said. Her brother, 28-year-old Jermaine Traxler, was fatally shot in St. Paul on Aug. 12, 2000.

Daryl Negel Curtis, then 19, was convicted of murdering Jermaine Traxler without provocation at a party.

Two years after he completed his prison sentence, Curtis was charged in an execution-style murder in St. Paul and is now serving a life sentence in prison.