A police union lawyer claimed on Friday that a sergeant was a “hero” for trying to save an elderly Queens granny from a burning building — and disputed family claims that he’d forced her out of her safe apartment and abandoned her in a smoke-filled hallway to die.

Sergeants Benevolent Association lawyer Andrew Quinn insisted Friday that Sgt. Timothy Brovakos nearly lost his own life in the effort to save 91-year-old Ethel Davis from a burning Rockaway Beach apartment building earlier this week.

He lost consciousness while carrying her out – then came to and still charged back up to get her, Quinn said.

Davis’ daughter says that she begged Brovakos to leave her frail, bedridden mother inside the fire-safe apartment, which FDNY officials say is standard protocol in this situation.

Quinn countered Friday that Brovakos was only doing his job when a fire broke out one floor below her apartment.

“Ask the fire officials where the f–k they were, because they weren’t on the goddamned 12th floor. It was all NYPD,” Quinn railed.

“There were firefighters there but they weren’t on the 12th floor knocking on doors. That was the cops.”

The NYPD launched a “major investigation” into the incident, The Post learned on Friday, after Davis’ daughter claimed she begged the cop not to remove her mother from the apartment.

The FDNY said that other residents in the building were told to remain in place, and NYPD guidelines state that officers should “avoid entering any building that is on fire.”

Nevertheless, Brovakos’ lawyer said his client wasn’t about to leave this woman behind.

“He risked his life to save this woman,” Quinn said. “This is what makes it difficult to be a cop these days. You run into a burning building to save lives and get blamed.”

Quinn said Brovakos told him that when they entered Davis’ door, smoke was filling the apartment. Brovakos radioed for backup.

They all fled willingly, he claims.

“You can’t leave my mother,” Quinn says Marcia Davis demanded as she fled. “She’ll burn.’

So Brovakos “goes back to the mother, grabs the mother out of the apartment, and runs the length of the hallway carrying her,” Quinn said.

Just short of the stairwell, Brovakos collapsed, Quinn said.

As his fellow cops tried to carry him down to safety, Brovakos insisted on returning to rescue the old woman, the lawyer insisted.

“The other officers said ‘don’t do it.’ And he goes anyway,” Quinn said.

“Then he gets her and picks her up with another officer and carries her down to the ninth floor.”

Nonsense, Davis and her lawyer said in response later Friday.

“The police never should have been evacuating people in the first place from the fire-safe building,” lawyer Peter S. Thomas told The Post.

“Marcia Davis demanded she and her mother stay in the apartment, but since the police had left the door open, they created a smoke condition,” Thomas said.

“I begged him to keep her here” in the apartment, Davis insisted. “I said, ‘We’re safer here.'”

Instead, the cops told her, “Y’all get the f–k out now,” she said.

Added the lawyer, “a real hero would have closed the door and stayed with these tenants to make sure they were safe, not force them into a dangerous circumstance.”