Ahmad Khan Rahami

To neighbors and customers of his family’s storefront chicken takeout, Ahmad Khan Rahami was a friendly, quiet presence behind the counter who liked talking about cars and was generous with free food.

So when the 28-year-old Afghan immigrant was apprehended Monday as the lead person of interest in bombings in New York and New Jersey, those who knew him expressed shock, questioning whether his turn to religiosity in recent years might have hinted at views he kept hidden.

Rahami’s father and brothers had long nursed tensions with neighbors and officials in Elizabeth, N.J., over the restaurant’s late hours, a conflict the family claimed in a lawsuit was the result of discrimination against them as Muslims.

But Ahmad Rahami’s demeanor — increasingly devout but more likely to talk about worldly pursuits than his faith — never hinted at anything but goodwill, customers said.

“He’d always talk about his cars. He loved his Civics, he loved going fast,” said Ryan McCann, a frequent customer at First American Fried Chicken, the restaurant that Rahami’s father, Mohammed Rahami, has run since 2002. “He was so friendly he’d give us free chicken here and there, just because we shopped there so much.”

Ahmad Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested after a shootout with police in Linden, a nearby town.

A law enforcement official says fingerprints and surveillance video helped investigators identify him as the man suspected of planting the bombs in the New York area over the weekend. The official says he’s seen in surveillance footage “clear as day” at the scene of the Saturday night bombing in Manhattan.

The official says investigators recovered his fingerprints from the scene.

Rahami wasn’t on any terror or no-fly watch lists, a law enforcement official said, but he’d been interviewed by officials for immigration purposes.