Earvin Ngapeth has had run-ins with authority figures that have taken a southern turn over the past few years, but recently, he was cleared of all charges related to a conflict with a railway controller.
The supposed incident occurred back in 2015 as the French National Team was on their way home from their gold medal performance at the 2015 FIVB World League. The team was on their way back from Rio de Janeiro when Ngapeth was arrested in Paris, accused of assaulting a controller at the “Montparnasse” train station in the French capital. Ngapeth and a relative were waiting for a third person to show up at the train station when he asked the controller if it was possible to delay the train to wait. Allegedly things went south from there, to which Ngapeth slammed the railway controller, leaving him with an injury to his eyebrow bone and away from work for 8 days.
The charges against the French volleyball star were acquitted as the Court of Appeal of Paris re-qualified the facts and will not pursue Ngapeth. The judge determined that since there was no physical evidence of a bruise of 7-millimeter would on the right eyebrow as said by the controller that the injuries inflicted on him were re-characterized as involuntary.
This is not Ngapeth’s only run-ins with the law in France, as he was charged for a fight in a nightclub in August 2012 along with a drunk driving incident in December 2017.
Ngapeth is one of the most sought out players in the world an has recently made the decision to leave Azimut Modena in the Italian Men’s League for Russia’s Zenit Kazan next season. The move from Ngapeth to the Russian League comes of no shock to anyone as he was repeatedly feuding with the team’s head coach Radostin Stoytchev all season, which included Ngapeth not showing up for scheduled practices and matches towards the middle of the season. He and his brother Swan Ngapeth were granted the right to rejoin the team after renegotiations following the incident.
Leave a Reply