What they didn’t know was that the seemingly harmless capuchin monkey was an illegal pet whose sharp teeth could maim a small child.

That’s exactly what happened last week when Kimberly Salinas toddled up to the chain-link fence that separates her home from Mimwon Khan’s backyard.

The monkey bit the 22-month-old’s hand, almost severing a finger.

“I heard the screaming,” said neighbor Moona Jahangir, who rushed to help. “The pinky was hanging and her bone was out.”

Kimberly underwent more than 12 hours of surgery at Bellevue Hospital in an effort to repair her damaged hand. She remained in the hospital yesterday.

The monkey was euthanized so it could be checked for rabies. Khan was arrested and arraigned on several charges, including reckless endangerment.

The tree buckled a sidewalk and fell into the yard of Manhattan’s Epiphany School at about noon.

A parent volunteer, identified by her husband as Monica Tompos, went to Bellevue Hospital with head and neck injuries, authorities said.

Emergency responders treated 13 children, mostly first-graders, in the school’s office for minor scrapes, bumps and bruises.

The high incidence of sexually transmitted herpes simplex virus 2 — which has no cure — is worrisome because people with it are much more susceptible to the AIDS-causing HIV virus, officials said.

“A person who’s herpes-infected . . . is two or three times more likely to get HIV,” said Dr. Julia Schillinger, a department director who was the study’s lead author.

The man, James Delayo, 60, the acting chief inspector for the Cranes and Derricks Unit at the city’s Department of Buildings, oversaw the issuing of city licenses for crane operators. The case against him, announced by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation, was filed just a week after the city’s second fatal crane collapse in less than three months.

Officials said the accusations against Mr. Delayo bore no direct relation to the accident last week at 91st Street and First Avenue, where two workers died, or the crane accident on East 51st Street that left seven dead in March.

But the case was another blemish on a Buildings Department that has been reeling from construction deaths and inspection lapses this year, and for which deadly crane accidents are part of a lingering series of problems.

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In 2004, the city’s Educational Construction Fund — an agency controlled by the mayor — leased the land to the DeMatteis Organization and the Mattone Group.

The luxury condo building going up at the site will also include the new, 520-seat Middle School 114. The developers will pay for both the $40 million school and the $103 million apartment building.

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