After three years spent locked up inside a Chinese jail, Wendell Brown finally returned back home this week.

Dressed in a black shirt with the word “Blessed” on the front, the 32-year-old linebacker was greeted on Wednesday at the Detroit airport by his emotional family before heading home for a full Thanksgiving dinner, prepared by his grandma, with absolutely no Chinese food.

“I’m just very fortunate that it’s over,” Brown told reporters afterward. “I’m blessed to finally be back in my family’s presence.”

Brown had been working as a football coach and English teacher in the mega-city of Chongqing when he got into a disagreement with a group of locals during a night out on September 24, 2016. The events of that night are still in dispute.

Alexis Andrews, a friend of Brown’s, told MichiganPreps.com that at another bar a short time later, Brown had described to her what had happened, telling her that the group of locals had become angry when he refused to party with them and that one man had thrown a bottle. Brown said that he had merely acted in self-defense.

“He told me everything that happened; how they were picking on him, and how they started off wanting to drink with him. When he was uninterested, they got upset, which is common,” Andrews said.

CCTV footage presented at Brown’s trial reportedly showed that Brown and another man had bumped into each other, leading to an exchange of words and shoves before a glass bottle was flung in Brown’s direction. Brown contends that he never threw a punch and only pushed the other man in an attempt to extricate himself from the situation.

However, the other man, surnamed Yu, was reportedly seen rubbing his eye after the fracas. While Yu suffered no structural damage to his face, he is said to have lost vision in his left eye and had to have it removed.

Brown said that he was unaware that anyone was seriously hurt in the clash. After heading to another bar to wait for things to cool off, he returned to the club that night where police were already investigating the scene. Brown was then brought into custody.

After he was arrested, Brown’s family was offered a settlement to avoid a trial. Originally, Yu’s side asked for 1 million yuan ($150,000) before dropping the price down to 800,000 yuan ($120,000). Either way, Brown’s family didn’t have that kind of money and were forced to put their faith in the Chinese legal system — where 99 percent of criminal trials end in conviction.

In 2017, Brown went on trial with his lawyers arguing that their client had only raised his arms in self-defense and that the 6-foot, 225-pound African American linebacker had been unfairly targeted by the group of locals.

Brown then had to wait nearly 10 months before the court finally rendered a verdict, sentencing him to four years in prison for assault.

The sentence was later reduced after Brown’s family paid 200,000 yuan ($28,000) in compensation from funds that had been donated to them. His release date was set to September 24, 2019.

Brown says that he holds no ill will towards China after being held behind bars for three years for a crime that he says he was wrongly convicted of, keeping him from seeing his young son, who is now 12 years old. Instead, he chooses to thank god:

I am thankful for every experience that I have in life. Everything is a lesson, and if you can’t use every situation you go through to grow from then you are doing something wrong. At least that is what I was taught. The lesson from this is to always have faith in God. Always believe in his power that he can do all things. If you believe fully and give yourself to the will of God then greatness awaits you on the other side. My family feels it every day. I feel it every day. We are stronger because of this. Our faith was tested and we never lost hope. We always believed. And because of our belief I am standing here today.

While Brown insists in calling his experience with the Chinese prison system a “beautiful time,” he admits that he lost around 30 pounds (13 kg) during his time in the slammer. He has declined to describe his living conditions for the past three years, saying that it all could have been worse.

He adds that he wouldn’t dissuade anyone from going to China and still plans to travel abroad.

Of course, it could also have been better. Brown’s case stands in rather stark contrast to that of LaMelo Ball and two of his UCLA teammates who were arrested in Hangzhou in 2017 for shoplifting.

After being confined to their hotel for less than a month, the trio were released with surprising speed with US President Donald Trump taking credit after personally bringing up the situation in talks with Xi Jinping.

Wendell Brown’s own mom tried to publicly call for Trump to intervene in her son’s predicament, but with no success.