According to Fox2 News and other sources, a Chinese court has had the sentence of former Winnipeg Blue Bomber and Swarco Raider Wendell Brown reduced by one year Tuesday after his appeal.
Brown has been in prison for nearly two years after a bar fight in China in 2016. His new sentence will end in less than a year, next September; he was to be held until 2020.
His mother offers an emotional statement.
As American Football International has reported earlier, the former Winnipeg Blue Bomberand Swarco Raider (Austria) has been languishing in jail in China since September 2016 after getting into an altercation with a few Chinese locals in a bar in Chongqing, China.
Brown was coaching football over in China with the Chongqing Dockers and was enjoying a night out with some friends, when, according to witnesses, he was provoked by a group of locals who were upset that Brown would not party with them. One of the men reportedly escalated the incident by throwing a glass bottle at Brown, who retaliated out of self-defense. The local police were contacted following the altercation, for which Brown was the only one arrested. The man demanded more than $100,000 in compensation for damages to his eye or else he would pursue the case in court. Brown has been in jail ever since. There is a 99.9 percent conviction rate in China and Brown’s trial was in July of 2017, but it had taken a year for the verdict to be announced.
Brown’s attorney says the man who accused him later admitted Brown, who appealed his sentence back in June, did not assault him.
After playing for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Canadian Football League and the Swarco Raiders in Austria, Brown went to China in 2015 to play for the Dockers and now was helping to coach them. He played his high school football at Martin Luther King High School in Detroit,where he was an all-state player at linebacker in 2004. He went on to play at Ball State, where he received bachelor’s degree
Brown’s case attracted worldwide attention after President Donald Trump had appealed to the Chinese government in the case of three UCLA basketball players, including LaVar Ball, who were accused of shoplifting in China. All three were allowed to return with the team to the United States while Trump remained silent in the case of Brown.