Yaqub Talib (left), the brother of NFL player Aqib Talib (right), pleaded guilty to murdering Michael Hickmon. (Mugshot: Dallas County Jail; image of Aqib Talib: AP Photo/Jack Dempsey, File)
Yaqub Talib, 40, the brother of retired NFL quarterback Aqib Talib, has pleaded guilty to murdering a rival youth football coach in the aftermath of a contentious game.
Dallas County prosecutors confirmed to Law&Crime that formal sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 7; the plea deal was for 37 years in prison. Loved ones of the victim, Michael Hickmon, 43, will have a chance to speak.
The Talib brothers’ team, the North Dallas United Bobcats, and Hickmon’s D.E.A. Dragons — both featuring 9-year-old players — faced off that fateful Saturday of Aug. 13, 2022 in the Dallas area city of Lancaster, Texas. The Bobcats stopped the Dragons at fourth-and-1 in the fourth quarter, giving them a chance to come back from a 13-7 score, but the refs penalized them for taunting after play, so the Dragons got the ball back, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Aqib Talib, the five-time NFL Pro Bowler who financed the Bobcats and whose son played running back, allegedly argued with officials.
He and his brother, whose son played quarterback, allegedly had a reputation for being bullies, losing their tempers when the games did not go their way, according to reports.
“If you’ve been around the youth football world, you know the Talib guys don’t like to lose and they give everybody a hard time,” Dragon Elite Academy president Courtney Jackson told the Morning News in August. “I would call it rambunctious and overly aggressive. In the youth football world if somebody is crying about a call you might say stop whining or quit crying. They don’t laugh those things off. It gets personal with them.”
This time, the situation escalated to 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 down marker and whose son was on the field at the time among dozens of other children, went to get it back and knocked it out of an opposing coach’s hand, said people at the scene, according to the Morning News. Someone kicked the ball. A melee ensued, with several people attacking Hickmon. Hickmon started swinging the down marker.
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There were five gunshots, striking Hickmon in the chest, back, and forearm.
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Yaqub Talib left the scene and surrendered two days later.
“Q [Yaqub] has always been the big brother bodyguard type,” Keith Hodge, who met the Talib brothers about eight years before when his son played youth football, told the Morning News. “Aqib Talib was always about the football thing and handling the business and Q was always the street one.”
#UPDATE: This is Mike Hickmon, the man who was shot and killed while coaching his team at a youth football game Saturday.
Coach Mike is known as a pillar of the community. Friends tell me his son was there during the incident and all the kids are traumatized by this. @cbsdfw pic.twitter.com/J6NghpSWaT— Alexis Wainwright (@AWainwrightTV) August 15, 2022
One of the lingering legacies of that day is how it affected the children who were present.
“I don’t know how to explain it to the kids,” Dragons president Mike Freeman told WFAA last year. “That’s the part that I’m stuck on right now. How do I explain it them. Why? This is something that these kids will remember for the rest of their life. They’ll never forget this moment.”
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