OAK RIDGE, TENN. ? A man wanted on rape charges committed suicide Thursday morning after his car was approached by police, and his two young daughters were found dead in the back seat, authorities said.

Tennessee Valley Authority spokesman John Moulton said investigators were calling it an apparent murder-suicide.

An officer patrolling a parking lot at the Bull Run fossil plant near Oak Ridge discovered Richard A. Howard, 32, sitting in his car, said Jim Carver, director of TVA police.

When the officer asked the man why he was there, “he said he had run out of gas, and he was waiting for someone to bring him some gas or some money to buy gas,” Carver said.

The officer at first did not notice the girls, who were covered in the back of the vehicle, Carver said.

A check of the car’s license plate revealed the outstanding warrants, and when the officer returned to the car he found Howard slumped over the steering wheel, dead from a gunshot wound.

Richard Howard holds his children, Markayla, left, and Brionna, during an interview in February in Tennessee. The bodies of Howard, a man wanted on rape charges, and his two daughters were found dead Thursday in a car, authorities said.

A suicide note, handgun and the bodies of daughters Brionna, 3, and Markayla, 2, were found in the car.

Authorities would not say when or how the girls were killed.

The man wrote in the note that he had killed the girls, Moulton said.

Howard, a former University of Tennessee football player who briefly signed with the Baltimore Ravens in the 1997 offseason, had two felony rape warrants against him in Montgomery County, about 200 miles west of Oak Ridge, Moulton said.

He also said the man was not an employee or contractor of TVA.

Howard had lived in Clarksville for seven years, working as a bouncer at several bars and for a bail bonding company, WSMV-TV in Nashville reported.