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To add to his distress, Escobar was growing panicky about the safety of his family. In recent weeks, his brother-in-law had been killed by police and his children's teacher had been murdered by PEPES, a vigilante group thought to comprise former colleagues whom the drug lord had betrayed, but also to include hit men from the rival Cali drug cartel. Fearing they would be next, his wife and children fled early last week to Germany, seeking asylum; they were promptly deported back to Bogota.
That led Escobar to two fatal mistakes. First, he called a Medellin radio station to complain about the "lack of solidarity by the German government." On Thursday, he dared to phone his family at Room 2908 in the Residencias Tequendama to say, "I'm fine," and advise them to "stay in Bogota for the time being." His wife, Maria Victoria Henao de Escobar, wished him a happy birthday and urged him to be careful. Within 90 minutes the calls had been traced through a scanning operation set up outside Medellin with U.S.-donated equipment. The high-tech equipment pinpointed the calls to a middle-class two- story house in the western part of the city.
Rather than risk a mass operation, the Search Block sent a small 17-man contingent to surround the house. They cut off telephones in the area so no lookout could call in a warning. Two armed officers loitered outside the suspect house until a teenager, described as a nephew of Escobar's, appeared at the door with lunch. The two swiftly slipped inside the front door with the youth, while four more police smashed through the carved-wood garage door. They entered shooting.
From their room upstairs, Escobar and his single bodyguard, Alvaro de Jesus Agudelo, returned fire. Having desperately thrust himself through a second- story window, Escobar, clad only in jeans and a T shirt, tried to climb through a narrow metal grating leading to the roof next door. From there, he might have been able to leap to the ground and dash into a nearby wooded area. But a fusillade of machine-gun fire stopped him on the grating; hit by seven bullets in the head and neck, he crumpled to the ground.
Twenty minutes later Escobar's mother arrived on the scene. "Thank God, ( he's finally at rest," she said. An hour later, another phone call reached Room 2908 at the Residencias Tequendama; a television reporter told Juan Pablo his father was dead. "If it's true," said the boy, unable to disguise the pain in his voice, "I'll kill all the sons of bitches." Later in a telephone interview with TIME, Juan Pablo said, "I apologize for my harsh words when I was told about my father's death. You must understand our grief. We've lost the head of our family, our beloved father. But I will not try to avenge my father's death. We want peace like the rest of Colombia."
Perhaps. But Colombia's remaining drug lords want not peace, but a piece of the action once controlled by the Medellin cartel. That was underscored late in the week by the wild celebrations in the city of Cali, where rival drug lords gathered at a party hosted by cartel ruler Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela to toast the death of a hated enemy who had sworn to kill them all.