The two monkeys reportedly stolen from the Dallas Zoo were found alive inside an abandoned home Tuesday — shortly after police released an image of a person of interest in the bizarre case.

The emperor tamarin monkeys were recovered from a house in Lancaster, Texas — just outside of downtown Dallas, a day after the theft, Dallas police and the zoo announced.

“We are thrilled beyond belief to share that our two emperor tamarin monkeys have been found,” the Dallas Zoo said in a statement.

The small, white-bearded monkeys were brought back to their habitat and will be evaluated by veterinarians, the zoo added.

Earlier Tuesday, the department released a photo of a man who investigators are looking to speak to about the animals.

Staffers at the zoo had discovered the two monkeys were gone Monday morning and noted that their enclosure “had been intentionally compromised.”

Investigators had believed the primates were taken because they wouldn’t have gone far from their home. Employees searched across the zoo grounds and didn’t find the animals.

The formerly missing monkeys were just the latest odd and unsettling occurrence at the Dallas Zoo this month that have led staffers to believe someone has been tampering with the animals.

First, a 4-year-old clouded leopard named Nova disappeared from her enclosure on Jan. 13, causing the zoo to shut down for a day as staffers searched for the feline.

The leopard was eventually found near her habitat hours after she was reported missing. Police said someone had used a tool to cut an opening in the fencing of her habitat.

Investigators discovered a similar opening in an enclosure of langur monkeys, but none of the monkeys escaped.

Twitter / @DallasPD

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About a week later, on Jan. 21, zoo staffers found an endangered vulture named Pin dead. The zoo said the vulture had suffered “a wound” and that his death was not believed to be natural.

“This goes from being about malicious and gets into really criminal intent that’s dangerous,” Dallas Zoo President and CEO Gregg Hudson told reporters during press conference two days later, according to the local CBS News station. “I’ve been in the zoo profession over 30-plus years, and never had a situation like what happened Saturday. It’s unprecedented and very disturbing.”

Pin was one of just 27 lappet-faced vultures in captivity in the US. He had lived at the Dallas Zoo for the past 33 years and fathered 11 offspring, the outlet reported.

Following the vulture’s death, the zoo installed additional security cameras with night vision to the grounds and increased onsite security during overnight hours.

Dallas police said the pictured person of interest is wanted for questioning regarding the emperor tamarin monkeys. It’s unknown if the same man is believed to be connected to the prior acts of vandalism at the zoo.

It’s unclear if there were any arrests after the monkeys were recovered.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin on Tuesday demanded the Secret Service provide the House Oversight Committee with visitor logs from the homes of former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence as the panel probes the mishandling of classified documents by top government leaders. 

Raskin’s request matches that of panel Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), who earlier this month demanded information from the Secret Service on visitors to President Biden’s Delaware home following revelations that highly sensitive material from his time as vice president was found in the house and garage.

“Given that the U.S. Secret Service provided protection for Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence during the time they stored classified materials at their respective residences, the Committee is seeking information from your agency regarding who had access to former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and former Vice President Pence’s personal residence since leaving office,” Raskin, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee, wrote in the letter to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. 

In the letter, Raskin gives the agency until Feb. 14 to comply with the request to turn over all documents and communications related to visitor information at Pence’s Carmel, Indiana home and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club since Jan. 21, 2021. 

Julia Nikhinson / CNP / SplashNews.com

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Interest in congressional oversight over the handling of classified documents has intensified after the revelation earlier this month that Biden, 80, stored several pages of classified material at his former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, DC.

Biden also admitted that classified materials were found inside his Wilmington home, prompting a federal criminal investigation.

Last week, Pence, 63, announced that he had also turned over about a dozen documents with classified markings to the National Archives after they were found at his home. 

Federal authorities have recovered some 300 classified documents from the Trump presidency at Mar-a-Lago and other storage sites since the 76-year-old former president left office. Like Biden, he is also under criminal investigation.

Regarding visitor logs at Biden’s home, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi claimed earlier this month that the agency doesn’t “independently maintain our own visitor logs because it’s a private residence.” But he later admitted that “the Secret Service does generate law enforcement and criminal justice information records for various individuals who may come into contact with Secret Service protected sites.”

According to a Fox News report, the Secret Service “is prepared to provide available background information on vetted guests to Biden’s residence if requested by Congress.”

WASHINGTON – Hunter Biden slipped his legal assistant thousands of dollars under the table while the two were in a sexual relationship over several months in 2018 and 2019, text messages recovered from the first son’s laptop show.

During this same period, Hunter, now 52, struggled with addiction to crack cocaine and had unrestricted access to his father’s Wilmington home, where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were improperly stored.

The assistant, whom The Post is not naming, is one of at least four people who hooked up with Hunter while on his payroll — including his sister-in-law Hallie, her sister Liz Secundy, and baby mama Lunden Roberts — according to a report by right-wing nonprofit research group Marco Polo.

The first son kept images of him having sex with the assistant at his Owasco law firm from around the summer of 2018 on his notorious “laptop from hell,” which was first brought to light by The Post in an explosive 2020 report.

The Marco Polo report states that the assistant received regular biweekly payments between mid-June and early October of 2018. However, during the same period, the assistant also received wires from the firm totaling almost $45,000 with mysterious explanations — including “new hire,” “8k wage,” “10k golf member,” and “Pay.”

The transactions found their way into a so-called “Suspicious Activity Report” (SAR) filed with the Treasury Department by JP Morgan Chase and currently being sought by House Republicans. That same SAR also highlighted payments made by Hunter to people with ties to human trafficking or the adult entertainment industry.

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However, the assistant’s money appeared to have run out by early 2019, when DailyMail.com reported she emailed Hunter’s secretary Katie Dodge to complain that she had not received her most recent paycheck and her dentist hadn’t accepted her Owasco insurance.

“Because of these two incidents, I’m curious to know if I have been terminated from this position,” the woman said in an email found on the laptop and posted by DailyMail.com. “… I haven’t been able to get any contact with Hunter so I am completely in the dark.”

On March 7 of that year, more than two months later Hunter sent the woman $1,000 via Apple Pay, asking “Does this work” and adding the money was “Just for small stuff”.

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“Appreciate it. Anything helps,” the woman replied. “I’ve really been scraping by the last month or so. I haven’t even paid my rent yet”.

After sending her another $1,500, Hunter offered her an arrangement: “I will bake (sic) up for back pay. You have to make up for back work,” Hunter Biden wrote back. “By [FaceTime]ing me and/or going to our next-club party.”

Two days later, on the morning of March 9, Hunter sent his assistant $500 and told her: “If we [FaceTime] the rule has to be no talk of anything but sex and we must be naked and we have to do whatever the other person asks within reason.”

After sending her another $750, Hunter asks: “Deal?”

Nearly five hours later, the woman responded: “When can you talk? I can later tonight.”

During the pair’s video chat, text messages show Hunter lavishing her with compliments and smaller amounts of money — totaling $155 and bringing the grand total over the previous two days to $3,905.

“I love your hair and/Pretty much everything else,” Hunter says in a pair of messages before telling the assistant to “Show me how you play with yourself/When you’re all alone.”

“We can have a contest to see who c-ms first,” he offers in a follow-up. “If you win you get 100 and if I win I just win/Everyone wins in this game.”

Lying Rep. George Santos’ longtime treasurer resigned from the Long Island Republican’s campaign on Tuesday — nearly a week after the campaign named a replacement who claims he didn’t agree to take the job. 

“At the request of the FEC, I am submitting this Form 99 stating that I have resigned as treasurer for the Devolder-Santos For Congress Committee as of January 25, 2023,” Nancy Marks wrote in her resignation letter filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Marks also resigned from four other political committees affiliated with Santos: Devolder-Santos-Van Duyne Victory Committee, Devolder-Santos Nassau Victory Committee, Devolder-Santos for Congress Recount, and Devolder-Santos Victory Committee. 

Marks noted that she had formally resigned from those positions last week, the same day paperwork was filed with the FEC naming Wisconsin-based consultant Thomas Datwyler as campaign treasurer. 

A lawyer for Datwyler claimed on Jan. 25 that Santos’ team had listed him as treasurer without his authorization. 

“On Monday we informed the Santos campaign that Mr. Datwyler would not be serving as treasurer,” the lawyer, Derek Ross, said in a statement. “It appears there’s a disconnect between that conversation and the filings which we did not authorize.”

The sketchy treasurer switch prompted the FEC to send a letter warning the campaign that it could face legal jeopardy if it failed to provide the regulator with accurate information about the change. 

“It has come to the attention of the Federal Election Commission that you may have failed to include the true, correct, or complete treasurer information,” the FEC wrote in a letter to Datwyler last week.

The FEC added that “knowingly and willfully making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to a federal government agency, including the Federal Election Commission, is punishable” under federal law before asking the campaign to clarify who its treasurer is.

The Justice Department has reportedly requested that the FEC not pursue enforcement action against Santos as it continues its criminal investigation into the freshman lawmaker.

The guidance sent by the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section signals that federal prosecutors may be centering their probe into Santos on his campaign finances, according to a Washington Post report last week.

Santos announced Tuesday that he would step aside from two House committees while probes into his campaign’s fundraising practices play out. 

He told fellow GOP lawmakers that he would “temporarily recuse” himself from the House Science, Space and Technology Committee and Small Business Committee because of the “ongoing attention surrounding both my personal and campaign financial investigations.”

A South Carolina law enforcement agent testified that accused killer Alex Murdaugh sobbed and said, “I did him so bad” when shown graphic photos of his slain son in what could be a possible confession.

Murdaugh’s defense attorneys refuted Tuesday that the legal scion actually said, “They did him so bad” through tears as they slowed down the audio recording of the interview conducted with state agents three days after he allegedly shot and killed his wife and son in June 2021.

State Law Enforcement Division senior special agent Jeff Croft testified he was “100% confident” Murdaugh said “I” during the interview — suggesting that the 54-year-old confessed to fatally shooting his son Paul, 22, and wife, Maggie, 52 at least four times with two separate gun near the dog kennels at their Colleton County hunting estate.

The prosecution has yet to explain why they have stressed the comment.

“What were the things going through your mind when you heard, or misheard, ‘I did him so bad?’” defense attorney Jim Griffin asked Croft during cross-examination in the Colleton County Courthouse. “I wasn’t a good dad? I spoiled him? Or, I killed him?”

“It was definitely something we needed to follow up on,” Croft responded. 

Croft told the court that he did not immediately ask for clarification on what Murdaugh meant because he did not want to lose his cooperation in the investigation. Griffin asked Croft why they did not bring it up when they interviewed him again three months later, to which the agent said they did not get around to it but did ask him explicitly if he killed his wife and son.

“[The jury gets] to hear the tape and make their own mind up on what he said, yes sir,” Croft said

Murdaugh, the disgraced heir of a powerful multi-generational legal dynasty, is accused of shooting his troubled son Paul twice with a shotgun, before then shooting Maggie with an AR-style assault rifle multiple times before receiving firing a single, execution-style shot to the back of her head while she was face-down on the ground not far from Paul.

Through four days of the trial, the prosecution again provided interesting tidbits of information surrounding the murder and investigation without offering any additional explanation — such as a $1,021.10 receipt from a Gucci store with an item circled or Maggie’s cellphone recovered on the side of the highway.

Murdaugh’s defense team cross-examined Croft — the prosecution’s 10th witness since the trial began — to try to poke holes in the investigation.

Croft was asked if he knew why state agents didn’t search Murdaugh’s home in the hours after the killings for dirty clothes, possible blood in drains or other evidence. Croft said he didn’t know what other agents did.

Griffin also asked Croft why agents didn’t search Murdaugh’s ill mother’s home until September — three months after the killings — even though that was the only place Murdaugh said he went before finding the bodies a little over an hour after he allegedly killed them.

“I know I did not go and I’m not sure what any of the other agents in the investigative circle had done,” Croft said.

Another witness on Tuesday testified about phone records which the prosecution claims contain “crucial evidence” in the case.

Alex Murdaugh told police hours after the killings and repeated in Croft’s interview three days later that he wasn’t at the kennels that night.

However, cellphone evidence indicates that he was in fact in the kennels with Maggie and Paul when the murders took place around 8:50 p.m. Prosecutors say he then tried to cover his tracks by visiting his mother while placing calls to family and friends. He called police at 10:06 p.m. after he returned home at 10:01 p.m.

Murdaugh’s lawyers have suggested “it’s much more likely” there were two shooters — neither of which were Murdaugh — which would explain two separate guns used. Neither murder weapon has been found.

Murdaugh, who has pleaded not guilty to the slayings, also faces 99 separate charges of financial fraud and trying to get a man to fatally shoot him so his surviving son Buster could collect a $10 million life insurance policy. That matter will be handled at a later trial.

While Murdaugh has proclaimed his innocence since his indictment last summer, prosecutors allege that he gunned down his family to cover up his extensive financial crimes.

If convicted of murder, he will face a minimum sentence of 30 years. Prosecutors are not pursuing the death penalty.

With Post wires

A Washington, DC employee was charged with murder in the shooting death of a 13-year-old boy who desperately yelled he was only a kid after he was shot, according to court docs.

Jason Lewis, a longtime Parks and Recreation Department employee, was taken into custody for second-degree murder on Tuesday — weeks after teen Karon Blake was killed in the pre-dawn shooting.

Blake and his friends allegedly broke into parked cars across from the boy’s middle school and in Lewis’ neighborhood before the fatal encounter on Jan. 7, authorities said.

The deadly shooting led to community outrage as the city’s police chief faced growing pressure to either arrest or at least identify the suspected shooter.

Blake and a group of teens were apparently robbing parked cars near Lewis’ home, according to an arrest warrant. Blake also allegedly ran straight at Lewis, 41, before he began shooting from his property.

Police relied on footage from other homes on the block, and in an arrest warrant detailed how Blake pleaded for his life after he was shot.

“The decedent (Blake) can then be heard yelling, ‘I am sorry’ numerous times, followed by ‘Please don’t’ and ‘No’ numerous times. The decedent yells, ‘I am a kid’ and ‘I am only 12’ numerous times,” the warrant states.

Metropolitan Police Department chief Robert Contee said the weeks-long probe took the required time necessary.

“There was somewhat of a self-defense claim that needed to be overcome,” Contee said.

Lewis’ attorney Lee Smith said his client was innocent.

“While this is certainly a tragedy, once all the facts are heard, I believe the jury will find that there was no crime here,” Smith said in a statement.

The footage has yet to be released, but the warrant says it shows Blake and others leaving what was a stolen car and breaking into other parked cars in the neighborhood. Contee said the youths were peering into cars with flashlights and going into them.

Lewis is charged with firing first at Blake while he was sitting inside the stolen car. In the confusion from that first shot, Blake apparently ran straight at Lewis before he was fatally wounded, police said.

“The first shot was fired … at someone sitting in a vehicle who wasn’t an immediate threat,” Contee said Tuesday. Once the first shot went off, when Lewis was not under personal threat was, is “where things really unraveled” that led to Blake’s death, Contee said.

“I don’t know if (Blake) knew that Mr. Lewis was standing where he was standing,” Contee said as he encouraged other teens with Blake that night to come forward. 

Lewis was held without bail until a court appearance on Feb. 13.

With Post wires

A once-trendy Manhattan hotel has become a wild “free-for-all” of sex, drugs and violence after the city began housing migrants there, an employee claimed Tuesday.

Row NYC worker Felipe Rodriguez — who told The Post earlier this month that migrants were throwing away “tons” of prepared food at the hotel — said the facility has now descended into “total chaos.

“Chaos, total chaos,” Rodriguez told “Fox & Friends” when asked to describe conditions at the hotel. “There’s no accountability.

“There is no daily supervision to show these people that … ‘You don’t destroy your hotel. You are only there temporarily. This is not your home.

“[The employees] endure a lot of disrespect from the migrants, and there [are] some nice migrants, but there’s too much alcohol, too much drugs and too much violence, and you have teenagers … going into the staircases and making out like it’s Lover’s Lane,” Rodriguez said. “This is a free-for-all.

The hotel, which was converted to house the sudden flood of migrants into the city, is just blocks away from the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, where dozens of asylum-seekers have been camped out for several days protesting their removal for new accommodations in Brooklyn.

Rodriguez, who is a runner at Row NYC, said that the hotel workers have been the ones who end up paying the price amid the anarchy. He said he was forced to go on disability after he was injured trying to deliver a refrigerator through a “cluttered” room.

Rodriguez told Fox that the hotel is making more money from the city than it would if it hosted guests. 

Over 43,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring, with some 26,000 housed in the city’s hotels, according to Mayor Eric Adams’ office. 

At a visit to the southern border earlier this month, Adams said migrants should be warned there’s “no more room” for them in New York as the price tag of of the crisis reached an estimated $2 billion.

” In New York, you go there, you’re going to be living in congregate settings, that there is no more room in New York. That should be coordinated by our national government,” he told reporters.

The 50 or so protesters outside of the Watson Hotel, who are all single men, are understandably upset that they are being upended from their three-star hotel where they were no more than two to a room for hangar-like conditions at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook.

President Biden, who visited Hudson Yards, declined to visit the protesters as they huddled under blankets outside of the 57th Street hotel, joined by activists.

Adams, who has publicly pleaded with the White House to provide $1 billion in emergency migrant aid, apparently never got a chance to meet with Biden to discuss the city’s migrant crisis, which the mayor has described as a “disaster.”

The massive mega shelter in Brooklyn, designed to house 1,000 people, has been lined with hundreds of cots next to each other, covered by a green blanket and featuring a single white pillow, according to footage provided to The Post on Monday.

Many migrants have griped about the lack of heat and privacy in the facility and its relative remoteness from life in the city as there are no subway connections.

The eyes of Dharmesh Patel, the man who allegedly tried to kill his family by driving a Tesla off a 250-foot cliff, appear bloodshot in his just-released mugshot.

The first glimpse of Patel since the horrific Jan. 2 crash shows the California doctor’s left eye almost completely filled with blood, which matches his ill-fitting prison garb.

The father of two also sports a scruffy beard as he stares, stone-faced, at the camera.

The 41-year-old was charged with three counts of attempted murder Monday for intentionally driving his wife and two children off a notoriously dangerous section of the Pacific Coast Highway known as the “Devil’s Slide” earlier this month. He also faces enhancements for great bodily injury and domestic violence.

Rescuers had to cut all four of the passengers — Patel, wife Neha, their 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son — from the mangled Tesla after it plummeted 250 feet onto the rocky beach.

Luckily, the entire family survived the crash in what officials are calling a “miracle.”

Neha was conscious when paramedics tore open the smart car and reportedly screamed that her husband had “intentionally tried to kill us.”

She and her daughter are still in the hospital recovering from unspecified serious injuries, though her son walked away from the crash with just bruises.

Patel — a radiologist at a Southern California hospital — had been hospitalized with “serious lower body injuries” until Friday, when he was booked into San Mateo County jail.

Investigators are still considering what led to the plummet. Officials don’t believe the Tesla was in self-drive mode and the car showed no signs of mechanical failure.

A video taken from a tunnel shows Patel “making a sharp right turn over the cliff” and an eyewitness said Patel didn’t try to brake.

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“We’re looking into what led up to this. Was there depression or anything else?” San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.

“It wasn’t just that he was trying to kill them, he was trying to kill himself too.”

President Biden gave Manhattan donors an update on his thoughts about nuclear war Tuesday, saying that he currently views global warming as a greater threat — less than four months after he casually told a different set of New York City donors that the world was close to nuclear “Armageddon.”

“[Global warming] is the single most existential threat to humanity we have ever faced, including nuclear weapons,” Biden told a small group of supporters on the Upper East Side after headlining a rail infrastructure event nearby.

It’s unclear if the 80-year-old commander-in-chief elaborated on his reasoning. Reporters were only allowed to see part of Biden’s remarks, and video of the private event was not immediately available.

There are enough nuclear weapons to directly kill most of the world’s population. Experts say a large-scale nuclear war would blanket the globe in dangerous radiation and cause a nuclear winter with decreased sunlight and lower temperatures that would finish off most survivors.

Some scientists say global warming is linked to more severe weather events such as hurricanes, but there are no near-term projections that the world will become totally uninhabitable.

The United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says sea levels could rise 50 centimeters by 2100 as a result of global warming, submerging some coastal areas including small island chains, while forcing expensive mitigation elsewhere.

Biden previously opined on nuclear threats at an Oct. 6 New York City fundraiser, shocking listeners by saying that nuclear “Armageddon” may be nigh due to NATO’s intervention against Russian forces in Ukraine.

“First time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” Biden said as he raised money for Senate Democrats.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Biden said at the time. “We’ve got a guy I know fairly well, [Russian President Vladimir Putin]. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”

Russia and the US own about 90% of the world’s roughly 12,700 nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom have smaller arsenals and Iran is suspected of working toward developing its own weapons.

Despite warning of dire threats from global warming, Biden regularly takes fuel-guzzling helicopters to spend the weekend at his Delaware homes, where he’s passed nearly a quarter of his presidency. Some of his predecessors, such as former President Barack Obama, would stay at the White House on weekends, sparing the expense — and emissions — of multiple motorcades and flights.

One of the officers charged with second-degree murder in connection to the brutal caught-on-camera fatal beating of Tyre Nichols once pulled a gun on two suspects and threatened to shoot them in the face, the men said.

Glenn Harris, 24, and Demarius Hervey, 27, told NBC News that former Memphis Police Officer Emmitt Martin III approached them at a gas station in August 2020.

The men — who say they are brothers — told the outlet they had been smoking marijuana and were in possession of an unregistered gun at the time and had tried to flee.

Harris and Hervey reportedly said they had tried to flee in Harris’ car, but crashed it after eluding cops for about two miles.

When Martin caught up with them, he pinned Harris on the ground, pointed his gun at his head, and said “I’ll blow your face off,” the man reportedly claimed.

“I got scared,” Harris told the network. “When I got out of the car and tried to run, that’s when Officer Emmitt grabbed me. He slammed me on the ground and pulled his gun out.”

Hervey said he was also threatened at gunpoint, and the men’s mother Stacy Harris corroborated the account.

“He told me [Martin] threw him to the ground and put the gun to him and told him he would ‘blow his f–king head off,’” she reportedly said.

Harris did not file a complaint because his main concern was getting out of jail, but his lawyer Arthur Horne said the suspect did share the same story with him.

“He said an officer pulled a gun out and held it to his head and called him the N-word,” Horne reportedly said. “I told him he could go to internal affairs, but they probably wouldn’t do anything.”

Harris was accused of possession of a handgun while under the influence, reckless driving, driving with a suspended/revoked/canceled license, leaving the scene of an accident and evading arrest, and no charges were filed against Hervey, according to the report.

“He was in the wrong, he wasn’t supposed to pull a gun on me,” Harris reportedly said.

Harris told NBC he realized Martin was the cop who had threatened to kill him after officials released security and bodycam video of the Jan. 7 beating fatal beating of Nichols, 29.

Nichols died three days after the prolonged attack, which involved a baton, fists, kicks, pepper spray and electroshocks. He had been pulled over for reckless driving and appeared to try to comply with police orders before taking off on foot after being tased and pepper-sprayed.

When cops caught up with Nichols about a half mile away, they mercilessly beat the unarmed man for about three minutes. Three responding emergency service workers were fired for refusing to render aid to him for more than 15 minutes after the beating.

Read more of The Post’s coverage of Tyre Nichols’ beating death

Martin and four other cops involved were fired 10 days later and brought up on murder charges on Jan. 26 in connection with the deadly beatdown. Another officer and two sheriff’s deputies were also relieved of duty.

Footage of the incident appeared to contradict police claims that Nichols was threatening them or reaching for their guns, and the video sparked nationwide protests reminiscent of the nationwide police brutality and systematic racism reckoning of 2020.

Nichols and all the officers involved are black men, but Ben Crumpp, the lawyer for Nichols’ family, has compared his death to Rodney King, Michael Brown and George Floyd — black suspects that were killed by white officers.

All of the accused former officers were part of the anti-crime street unit SCORPION, which was shut down by cops in the wake of Nichols’ death.

One of the ex-cops, Demetrius Haley, allegedly once beat up an inmate when he served as a corrections officer. Former prisoner Cordarlrius Sledge told The Post last week that Haley and another CO had punched him in the face and slammed him face-first into a sink at the Shelby County Division of Corrections in 2015 while searching for a cellphone.