A Simi Valley police officer has been cleared of any wrongdoing in a 2007 incident in which his patrol car nearly killed a pedestrian.

At the conclusion of the threeweek-long civil trial, jurors determined Sgt. James Buckley wasn’t negligent when he ran down Mark Weiler, 28, in May 2007. Weiler, who is in a wheelchair as a result of the incident, was asking for millions of dollars from Buckley and the city of Simi Valley.

Weiler’s lawyers claimed that Buckley was distracted because of a serious conflict with a suspect not long before he struck Weiler.

In the earlier incident, Raymundo Guerrero Garcia, 31, was under the influence of cocaine when he drove his vehicle into a yard and resisted arrest. Police used a Taser stun gun on Garcia, stunning him at least 11 times.

When Garcia began experiencing obvious health problems, Buckley administered CPR, but Garcia died about a week later of asphyxia related to being restrained by officers, according to Ventura County Medical Examiner Ronald O’Halloran.

At 12:10 a.m. on May 16, 2007, hours after the encounter with Garcia, Buckley was driving down Alamo Street just minutes from police headquarters when he struck Weiler.

With a blood-alcohol level measuring 0.23 percent, Weiler had earlier wrecked his car on the road after drifting onto the center median and hitting several trees. He’d left his vehicle and stepped into the street when Buckley hit him.

Buckley, who joined the Simi Valley Police Department in 1997, was back on active duty within a few days of the accident.

The city used an outside counsel—Benjamin Coats with the Ventura law firm of Engle, Carobini, Covner & Coats—to try the case.

“We’re very pleased with the decision,” said Tracy Noonan, Simi Valley’s city attorney. “We fully supported Sgt. Buckley because we know it was out of his control. We fought this because we believed the city did nothing wrong.”

Sgt. Adam Darough, the department’s public information officer, declined to comment on the matter.