The SUV driver who crashed into a group of law enforcement cadets last week in Los Angeles County has denied claims of intentional wrongdoing and said that he fell asleep at the wheel.
“It wasn’t intentional,” Nicholas Joseph Gutierrez, 22, said in an interview with NBC Los Angeles on Monday, adding, “I wish it never happened. I feel bad it happened.”
Gutierrez claims he woke upon recruits banging on his vehicle window. “When I got out I asked if they were OK and they pulled me out, took me to the ground.”
Gutierrez’s Honda CR-V ran into a group of law enforcement cadets on a training run at about 6:30 a.m. Nov. 16 in South Whittier, just blocks from the sheriff’s STARS Explorer Academy law enforcement training center….