By late 1993, Pablo Escobar was nothing like the man who had once ranked as the seventh-richest person in the world. His Medellín Cartel had been dismantled. His bodyguards were dead or captured -- the last chief of security, known as El Angelito, had been killed by police in October 1992 along with his brother. Escobar's own family was under siege: his mother survived multiple assassination attempts by Los Pepes, a shadowy vigilante group with suspected ties to rival cartels and Colombian security forces. His brother Roberto, already in prison, lost the sight in one eye from a letter bomb sent by the same group. Escobar tried repeatedly to negotiate surrender in exchange for his family's safety, but found no support from the government. He attempted to send his wife Victoria Henao and their children to the United States, then to Germany, but each time they were turned back -- deported from Frankfurt after the DEA alerted German authorities with agents aboard the plane.

On December 1, 1993, Escobar celebrated his 44th birthday in hiding with a gathering that measured how far he had fallen. His only companions were his cousin Luzmila Gaviria, his mother, and his last remaining bodyguard, Álvaro de Jesús Agudelo, known as Limón -- a man who had previously served as his brother Roberto's driver. No cartel lieutenants. No entourage. No lavish estate. Escobar had been moving between safe houses by taxi, sharing cramped quarters with Limón, a fugitive so isolated that he had explored becoming an accountant for the FARC guerrillas. By the time he made the birthday call to his family at the Tequendama, the Colombian government was using French and British signal-tracking technology, acquired with DEA assistance, that could not only identify calls but triangulate the caller's location in real time.

The fatal call came on the afternoon of December 2. Following his routine, Escobar phoned the Tequendama Residences, disguising his voice. But the second call stretched past the two-minute threshold. The tracking equipment locked onto his signal. Members of the Search Bloc -- the elite Colombian police unit that had hunted Escobar for years, operating with U.S. intelligence support -- moved immediately to the Los Olivos neighborhood. The house sat in a modest residential area near the Atanasio Girardot Sports Complex. When the Search Bloc surrounded the building, Limón fled through a window and dropped to a lower roof. He was hit multiple times while running and fell to the ground below. Escobar attempted to escape across the rooftops. He was struck by bullets in the torso and feet, and then by a single round to the head that killed him.

Who fired the fatal shot has never been settled. At least five competing accounts have circulated in the decades since. Escobar's family maintains he killed himself with a shot below the right ear, consistent with the cartel motto of Los Extraditables: "We prefer a grave in Colombia than a prison in the United States." Others attribute the killing to a sniper from Los Pepes, or to a DIJIN officer embedded in the Search Bloc. Colonel Hugo Heliodoro Aguilar, who led the assault team, was also named, though he was later convicted of ties to paramilitary groups in an unrelated case. A former paramilitary fighter claimed that Carlos Castaño Gil, the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, fired the shot. The physical evidence -- a bullet wound behind the right ear on a man running across a rooftop -- is consistent with multiple scenarios, and Colombia has never conducted a definitive forensic inquiry.

Escobar's death fragmented the Medellín Cartel and shifted the cocaine trade's center of gravity to the rival Cali Cartel, which dominated the market until its own leaders were captured in the mid-1990s. But in Medellín itself, the reaction was not the celebration one might expect. Over 25,000 people attended Escobar's funeral at Monte Sacro Cemetery in Itagüí. Many were from the city's poorest neighborhoods, communities where Escobar had built housing, funded soccer fields, and distributed cash -- a calculated generosity that earned him a Robin Hood reputation among people the Colombian state had largely ignored. Decades later, that complicated legacy persists. Some residents still pray to Escobar as a folk saint. Others, particularly the families of his thousands of victims, see the mourning as an insult to the dead. The rooftop in Los Olivos where he fell has been demolished. The neighborhood moved on. The debate has not.