JAMISON — An Army officer suspected of killing four people in Pennsylvania and Virginia was found dead in a wooded area Sunday after a manhunt during Tropical Storm Irene’s winds and drenching rains paralyzed residents in this Philadelphia suburb.

Hours after he fired at several officers, wounding two of them, the body of Leonard John Egland, 37, of Fort Lee, Va., was found around 3:30 p.m. in this Bucks County community, said Warwick Township Police Chief Mark Goldberg.

The police chief said Egland had a gunshot wound but he would leave it to the coroner to determine if it was self-inflicted.

Egland’s body was found several hundred yards behind a Lukoil gas station where authorities say he had fired a semiautomatic rifle at SWAT team members who discovered his truck and found him before dawn in a trash bin. The officers chased him into the woods but lost him as the storm raked the area, Goldberg said.

“It was bad,” he said. “Weather conditions were horrible and it was a very dangerous situation.”

He said the SWAT teams had “performed courageously.”

Three Bucks County SWAT teams, state police and numerous police departments searched for Egland after his former mother-in-law was found shot to death in her home in Buckingham. Authorities in Virginia said Egland had earlier killed his former wife, her boyfriend and the boyfriend’s young son before taking his own young daughter on a frantic drive through Irene’s winds and rains into Pennsylvania.

The girl, believed by Goldberg to be about 6 years old, was abandoned Saturday night by Egland, unharmed, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Quakertown, apparently after the child’s grandmother was killed.

Egland had recently returned from the latest of three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Heckler said.