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LOS ANGELES — A man sought in the fatal shooting of his estranged wife and a daughter and the wounding of two other daughters was found dead Friday after an apparent leap from a freeway into the shallow Los Angeles River, police said. 

The body was spotted in a few inches of water beneath an overpass. 

“It’s him. The detective had a photograph and confirmed it’s him,” Officer Raymond Rangel said near the scene north of downtown. The concrete-lined river has little flow. 

“It appears he may have jumped from the 134 Freeway,” Officer Jason Lee said. 

Gabriel Ghazelian, a San Fernando Valley resident, showed up at his wife’s house Thursday evening and asked for a ride  

to his car, which he said  

was broken. 

While riding in the family minivan he pulled out a handgun “for no apparent reason and with no warning” and opened fire, Detective Jose Carrillo said. 

Ghazelian killed his wife, Zabel Ghazelian, 40, from whom he’d been separated for over a year, and his daughter, Garine Ghazelian, police said. He wounded his 17- and 14-year-old daughters. He then fled. 

The surviving girls, whose names were not released, remained in critical condition Friday. Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said the 14-year-old was shot in the head and the 17-year-old in the cheek. 

The shooting occurred around 8:30 p.m. after the wife and daughters arrived home in Burbank to find Ghazelian, 49, claiming his car had broken down by Griffith Park, just south of Burbank and northeast of downtown Los Angeles. 

His wife agreed to give Ghazelian a lift, and as they drove they got caught in slow-moving traffic caused by Griffith Park’s popular annual light show. It was then Ghazelian began to shoot, police said. 

Carrillo said police were not certain of the motive but based on interviews with a few family friends, “I think it just has to do with the separation and possibly a pending divorce,” he said. 

Carrillo declined to say whether police knew of any history of violence in the family.