The man wore glasses, a baseball cap and jeans, probably blue.

He asked a question, but Aaron Esh, 13, can’t remember what it was.

The man then left.

Aaron, sitting at his desk, saw the man walk to a truck backed up to the front of West Nickel Mines School, a small, beige building protected by a white picket fence.

Aaron could hear the man outside loading a gun. He knew then, he said, something was terribly wrong.

About five minutes later, a man identified by police as 32-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV stormed the classroom brandishing the gun and demanding all the students lie down in the back of the classroom, Aaron said.

“He said, ‘No one’s gonna get hurt,’ ” Aaron said. “He sounded very calm. He didn’t sound all that mean.”

But Esh just wanted to escape. The younger children in the classroom were crying.

About five to 10 minutes later, Roberts separated all 15 male students, including Esh. He ordered them to leave and kept the young girls inside.

As soon as they were released, Esh and his friends sprinted out the door and through the fields to a nearby Amish farm.

The teenage boy was already safe at the farm and didn’t hear the round of gunfire that killed two female peers and one teacher’s aide and critically wounded seven others in an “execution-style” shooting.

Police said Roberts bound the girls’ legs with plastic wire and lined them up along the chalkboard. He shot them each in the head.

The girls in the class, Aaron said quietly, were his friends.

Monday evening the mild-mannered boy sat with his legs outstretched on the front lawn of his family’s home. His light brown bangs fell slightly over his large brown eyes.

Just down the hill on White Oak Road sat the small school, now inundated with ambulances and police preparing to remove the dead bodies from inside.

Aaron and his cousins sat in a circle, all trying to make sense of the cold-blooded murders that transformed their quiet, close-knit community into a movie-like crime scene.

Aaron stared down at his lap solemnly, speaking only when spoken to.

“I’m in shock,” he said almost in a whisper. “Just sad.”