In sentence 2 the immediate context before and after the target word seem contradictory: "... action have occurred..." implies occur-v.1 (to "happen or take place"), while "... occurred to him ..." implies occur-v.1 (to "come to mind").
when considering the whole context occur-v.2 fits best, and in fact, the selectors for this instance match with many of the most frequent selectors for occur-v.2 such as 'belong', 'lead', 'listen', and 'try'.