Kyle Bickham loved Derrick Rose as much as he hated Aaron Rodgers.
The true Chicago sports fan and his father, Christopher Bickham Sr., would play different NBA video games together between bouts on the actual court, and cried together when Rose tore his ACL in 2012.
Just days after the younger Bickham had secured a new apartment for him and his girlfriend, closer to the warehouse where he worked in Cicero, his death on the CTA Red Line earlier this week was ruled a homicide.
“It made it hurt a bit more; people took my son’s life,” his father, Christopher Bickham, told the Sun-Times. “He was making the right moves to make everything add up. … [And] they took greatness, they took happiness from me.”
After initially claiming he had jumped from the train, police said about 2:30 p.m. Monday, a fight erupted aboard a Red Line train in the first block of West 69th Street, and three people involved in the altercation pushed Kyle Bickham, 29, off the train.
Bickham was then hit by a train and was dead on the scene, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. His death was ruled a homicide.
A 15-year-old girl was arrested and charged Friday with first-degree murder and four other felonies, including aggravated battery of a transit employee and mob action, Chicago police said Saturday. No other arrests have been made.
“The story changed a lot of times before we knew what really happened,” Kyle’s younger sister Kayla Bickham said. “It still doesn’t really make sense to us.”
Overall crime on the CTA has dropped 30% in the first half of the year as Chicago police and the Cook County sheriff’s office have focused increased patrols since March. The decline comes after 2025 saw 469 violent attacks aboard the city’s transit system, the most on record in more than 25 years, the Sun-Times previously reported.
The attack prompted his family to call for better redistribution of the security resources on the city’s trains. His father also urged bystanders to step in if they saw someone in a life-threatening situation similar to his son’s.
“With all the cameras, with all of the security and stuff they say they have, if they have all these things, why would this happen?” Christopher Bickham Sr. said. “There are some things that have to be done at the CTA.”
But Kayla Bickham wants people to remember her brother as the “great person he was” — and also the talkative, kind and giving class clown who “was always the person to bring back the mood no matter what.” His dad said he “wore his heart on his sleeve,” which he said is a “Bickham thing.”
Kayla spent her Friday playing the decade-old multiplayer videogame Overwatch, just as her and her brother would do whenever he had time off work.
Kayla said the family bonded by watching shows like Naruto together, but her and Kyle in particular had been “super close” given they had the smallest age gap between siblings. She would spend weekends growing up watching him play video games like Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War, and soon he started teaching her how to play.
She said she was thankful to have a built-in best friend who never judged her interests.
“Now I’m a little better than he was [at gaming], and he was always really proud,” Bickham, 27, said. “I’m always gonna keep playing.”
A GoFundMe posted by Bickham’s brother had raised nearly $4,200 of its $6,500 goal by Thursday afternoon.