STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Okay, so he and a group of his friends may have been throwing eggs at passing cars Sunday night in Midland Beach.

But 12-year-old Nicholas Hinkley said he will have nightmares for a long time about what happened next: A man jumped out of his car, grabbed him and pointed a gun at his head, saying it was all to "teach him a lesson," the teen said.

The man — with a full beard and mustache, wearing a black baseball hat and jacket — circled his silver Lincoln around the block after an egg had whizzed past his window at about 8:30 p.m. near the corner of Mason and Bedford avenues, said Nicholas.

After yelling to a woman in the car something about "having some fun with the kids," he ran toward them, and they scattered. Still, the nearly 6-foot-tall pursuer got a hold of Nicholas’s arm, and held it so tightly he couldn’t escape. He walked with him for a while, growling threateningly into his ear, the teen recounted.

"He said, ‘I could just punch you and leave you right here and let you stay here bleeding on the floor.’ He told me, ‘I can shoot you. You don’t know who I am, I could be the cops for all you know,’" the sixth-grader said, describing how he was looking around the quiet residential block, hoping someone would see and come to his aid.

"He threw me on the floor. He was just standing there. I told him sorry and I wasn’t the one that threw the egg," said Nicholas, his voice sounding tight and stressed as he recounted the incident on the phone from his New Dorp home today. "I was really scared."

The man asked where he went to school. When Nicholas confessed Egbert Intermediate, he asked if he knew his own daughter, who also happened to be a student there. He did not recognize the name.

"Then he rolled up his jacket. He took the gun out of the holster and pointed it toward my face," said Nicholas. "I told him, I could have my parents come and tell him I didn’t throw the egg. I was thinking he was really going to shoot me."

It seemed like forever, he lay on his back on the ground — the man towering above him, with a gun in his hand, Nicholas said. Then he simply pulled his jacket closed and turned back toward the car.

"He said, 'you’re a lucky man' because he’s in a good mood and I had entered the gates of hell," said Nicholas, who even after the car sped off, feared his tormenter would come back.

When a woman came outside to smoke a few doors away, he asked her to take him inside away from the street. He called his parents to come get him.

"Was he wrong to be throwing eggs, yes. He’s never going out with that group or to that neighborhood again," said his father, Joe. "But an adult doesn’t do something like that. That’s ludicrous. That’s insane. You don’t do that to a child."

He said he filed a police report immediately, and drove back through the neighborhood to see if any nearby homes had video surveillance cameras. He said he hoped getting the news out about the man and his description might help police track the "lunatic" down.

A police spokesman confirmed there is an open investigation into a possible case of menacing, in connection with the incident. Police today visited the scene where it was said to have taken place to interview neighbors and look for video footage.

"When I picked him up he was crying," recalled Nicholas’s mother, Estrellita.

She kept her son home from school today, because he was worried that man could be there and spot him, if his daughter really is a student there as he said. She said she is even thinking of trying to get him a transfer out of the school.

"I am furious. That’s not the way that you tell somebody you hit my car with an egg. You use a weapon?"