MERRIMACK – Middle Easterners have almost come to expect acts of violence that kill and maim hundreds at a time.

Tragically, these deadly street skirmishes and bombings have become so commonplace, very few make top headlines in a comparatively civil America half a world away.

Last week, though, the tentacles of such political and religious strife proved just how far they can reach when fallout from an Aug. 15 Beirut car bombing landed at the doorstep of a Merrimack family.

That’s when Lebanese immigrant Samer Safa, for years the popular owner of Reeds Ferry Market on Daniel Webster Highway, learned his brother, Mohamad Safa, was among the 22 people killed when a car bomb detonated on a busy street in the Rweiss district, a Beirut suburb south of the city.

Samer Safa, who goes by Sam and coincidently was planning to leave this week to visit family in his native Lebanon, instead departed immediately after getting the news about his brother, longtime friend and neighbor Chuck Mower said.

Two employees at Reeds Ferry Market said Monday that Mohamad Safa was being buried that day and they didn’t believe Sam Safa could be reached. They said Safa’s wife, Inas Dirani, stayed in Merrimack with the couple’s four young children and was busy trying to manage the store and take care of their home and children while Safa’s away.

Mower, a Depot Street resident who said his kids all worked at the market when they were younger, called Sam Safa “a true American success story” and “a great guy” who was “such a good neighbor to me.”

The Daily Star, a Lebanese English-language newspaper, mentioned Mohamad Safa in its coverage of the story, stating that he has been employed by the An-Nahar newspaper as an accountant since 2002.

The Star reported that in addition to Safa, the blast killed a young Syrian refugee girl and about two dozen others, and injured close to 300 people. The newspaper described the bombing site as “an overwhelmingly Shiite area” and stronghold of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Mower said he believes Mohamad Safa just happened to be in the area when the bomb went off.

“It seems he was an innocent bystander,” he said. “This was a major event, a dangerous escalation in car bombings,” and similar violence in Lebanon, “but it didn’t really get a lot of press.”

While Mower never met Mohamad Safa, he said his brother epitomizes hard-working immigrants who become American citizens and strive toward business success and contribute to their community.

“I wrote a letter of recommendation for him when he became a citizen,” Mower said of Sam Safa. “I was proud to do it. Sam’s always been a great neighbor and friend.”

By Monday, a string of messages offering condolences and support, many written in Arabic, appeared on Sam Safa’s Facebook page. According to Mohamad Safa’s Facebook page, he graduated from Al-Maanieh High School in 1997 and had married Rania Cherry less than three months ago, on May 26.

The Daily Star identified her as Rania Ahmad Serri, and said the couple has two daughters, Lynn and Julia.

A video tribute to Mohamad Safa, consisting of interviews in Arabic with several of his co-workers at An-Nahar, appears on the newspaper’s website.

Another news outlet that covered the bombing, the English-language source Times of India, reported that Lebanon’s interior minister, Marwan Charbel, said officials were conducting DNA tests at the scene, partly in hopes of determining whether the blast was the work of a suicide bomber.

The explosion sent a massive plume of black smoke billowing into the sky, set several cars ablaze and blew out the fronts of buildings on the street, the Times reported. The blast, which was the second in about a month and the deadliest in decades, is believed to have been in retaliation for Hezbollah’s armed support for Syrian president Bashar Assad in that neighboring nation’s civil war.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).