Yaqub Talib (left), the brother of NFL player Aqib Talib (right), has pleaded guilty to the murder of Michael Hickmon. (Mugshot: Dallas County Jail; Image by Aqib Talib: AP Photo/Jack Dempsey, File)
Yaqub Talib, 40, brother of retired NFL quarterback Aqib Talib, has pleaded guilty to murdering a rival youth football coach following a controversial game.
Dallas County prosecutors confirm to Law&Crime that formal sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 7; the plea deal was 37 years in prison. The relatives of the victim, Michael Hickmon, 43, will be given the opportunity to speak.
The Talib brothers’ team, the North Dallas United Bobcats and the Hickmon DEA Dragons – both comprised of 9-year-old players – faced off that fateful Saturday, August 13, 2022 in the Dallas-area town of Lancaster, Texas. The Bobcats stopped the Dragons in the fourth quarter and first quarter in the fourth quarter, giving them a chance to come back from a 13-7 score, but the referees penalized them for mocking after the play, so the Dragons won the ball back, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Aqib Talib, the five-time NFL Pro Bowler who bankrolled the Bobcats and whose son played running back, reportedly argued with officials.
He and his brother, whose son played quarterback, reportedly had a reputation for being bullies, losing their temper when games weren’t happening, according to reports.
“If you’ve been around the world of junior football, you know the Talib guys don’t like to lose and they give everybody a hard time,” Courtney Jackson, president of Dragon Elite Academy, told Morning News in August. “I would say it’s exuberant and overly aggressive. In the world of youth football, if someone is crying because of a call, you can tell them to stop whining or to stop crying. They don’t laugh at these things. It gets personal with them.
This time, the situation degenerated into tragedy.
After the game, one of the Bobcats coaches apparently took the game ball, even though it was supposed to go to the Dragons, who actually won.
Hickmon, one of three people handling the marker and whose son was on the field at the time among dozens of other children, went to retrieve it and knocked it out of the hand of an opposing coach, people at the scene said, according to the Morning News. Someone kicked the ball. A melee ensued, with several people attacking Hickmon. Hickmon started swinging the marker down.
There were five shots, hitting Hickmon in the chest, back and forearm.
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Yaqub Talib left the scene and surrendered two days later.
“Q [Yaqub] was always kind of a big brother bodyguard,” Keith Hodge, who had met the Talib brothers about eight years prior when his son was playing junior football, told the Morning News. “Aqib Talib has always been about football and business management and Q has always been about the streets.”
#UPDATE: This is Mike Hickmon, the man who was shot and killed while coaching his team at a junior football game on Saturday.
Coach Mike is known as a pillar of the community. Friends told me that her son was there during the incident and that all children are traumatized by it. @cbsdfw pic.twitter.com/J6NghpSWaT— Alexis Wainwright (@AWainwrightTV) August 15, 2022
One of the enduring legacies of that day is how it affected the children who attended.
“I don’t know how to explain it to kids,” Dragons president Mike Freeman told the WFAA last year. “That’s the part I’m stuck on right now. How do I explain to them. Why? It’s something that those kids will remember for the rest of their lives. They’ll never forget that moment.
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