New York: Neighbors and customers of his family’s storefront chicken takeout remember Ahmad Khan Rahami as a friendly, quiet presence behind the counter who liked talking about cars and was generous with free food.
Naturally, those who knew him were shocked when the 28-year-old Afghan immigrant was arrested on Monday as the lead person of interest in bombings in New York and New Jersey.
“He’d always talk about his cars. He loved his Civics, he loved going fast,” Ryan McCann, a frequent customer at First American Fried Chicken, the restaurant that Rahami’s father, Mohammed Rahami, has run since 2002, said. “He was so friendly he’d give us free chicken here and there, just because we shopped there so much.”
Rahami, who happens to be a naturalized US citizen, was detained after a shootout with police in Linden, a nearby town.
Police say that fingerprints and surveillance video helped investigators identify him as the man suspected of setting off bombs in the New York area over the weekend.
Flee Jones, 27, who has known Rahami since they were teenagers, told reporters he’d noticed a change in Rahami’s personality after a trip to Afghanistan in 2014. When Rahami returned, he “got more religious” and dressed differently than before, Jones informed.
“He was more quiet and more mature,” Jones said. “I said, ‘Oh, where have you been?’ And he said, ‘Oh, vacation.’ But I knew he went to Afghanistan because his little brother said it.”
CNN reports, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, that Rahami traveled several times to Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent years, including a year-long stay in Pakistan until March 2014. Police were looking into whether he was radicalized overseas, CNN said.