Mark Bowden - Killing Pablo - The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

They turned around and crept back. The line stretched slowly until it once again filled the screen. They stopped. This was it. They drove past that point again just to make sure; again the signal grew, peaked and then slightly diminished.

The driver turned around again. As they approached the house where the signal was strongest, Hugo looked up . . . and saw him.

A fat man stood in the second floor window. He had long, curly black hair and a full beard. The image hit Hugo like an electric shock. It was Pablo Escobar.

He was talking on a cell phone. Suddenly he stepped back from the window. Hugo thought he had seen a look of surprise. Through his headphones, he heard Escobar say "Good luck," and end his conversation with his son.

Hugo and his team had been eavesdropping on Escobar for three days as he telephoned his wife and son at a hotel in Bogota. The fugitive was trying to get his family safely out of Colombia. Until this moment, the officers had not been able to tell exactly where his calls were coming from.

Now Escobar was literally right in front of them. Years of effort, hundreds of lives, thousands of futile police raids, untold millions of dollars, countless man hours, all of the false steps, false alarms, blunders. And here he was at last, one man in a nation of 35 million people, one man in a ruthless underworld he had virtually owned for nearly two decades, one man in city of more than a million where he was revered as a legend.

Hugo leaned out and told the officers in the car behind him, "This is the house."

It was a simple two-story rowhouse in the middle of the block with a squat palm tree in front. Hugo suspected Escobar had been spooked by their white van cruising slowly past, so he told his driver to keep going down to the end of the block. Shouting into the radio, Hugo asked to be connected to his father, Col. Hugo Martinez, commander of the Colombian police Search Bloc.

"I've got him located," Hugo told his father. "He's in this house."

The colonel knew this was it. Hugo would not be saying this unless he had seen Escobar with his own eyes.

"Station yourself in front and in back of the house and don't let him come out," his father said.

Then the colonel ordered all units to converge on the house immediately.

Two men positioned themselves against the wall on either side of Escobar's front door. Hugo's van drove around the block to the alley. There was a one-story garage with an orange tile roof extending from the back of the house. With weapons ready, they waited.

It took about 10 minutes for the rest of the Search Bloc force to arrive.

"Martin," one of the lieutenants assigned to the Search Bloc assault team, stood ready as his men applied a heavy steel sledgehammer to the steel front door. It took several blows before it went down.

Martin sprinted into the house with the five men on his team, and the shooting began. The first floor was empty, like a garage. A yellow taxi was parked toward the rear, and a flight of stairs led up to the second floor.

As the police pushed upstairs, Escobar's lone bodyguard, Jesus Agudelo, called "Limon," jumped out a back window and fell about eight feet to a grating on the garage roof. As Limon sprinted out across the tiles, the Search Bloc force in the alley below opened fire.

According to the police, Limon was hit at least four times as he ran. Hugo said his momentum carried him right off the roof, and Limon fell lifeless to the grass below. The fatal shot struck him directly in the center of the forehead.

Escobar had come out the window behind Limon. He had stopped to kick off his plastic flip-flops, and dropped down to the roof. Police said he was carrying a pistol and a rifle. He stayed close to one wall, where there was some protection.

Police Maj. Hugo Aguilar, who had climbed onto the roof overhead, could not get a clear shot down at him. So there was a break in the firing as Escobar moved along the wall toward the back street.

At the corner, Hugo said later, Escobar pointed his weapons in both directions, shouted, "Police mother---s! Police mother---s!" and fired rounds that hit no one.

Then he broke for the crest of the gently sloping tile roof, trying to make it to the other side. A cascade of fire felled him at the center of the roof. He sprawled on his broad belly on the dislodged orange tiles, hit by a round in his thigh and another in his back, just below the right shoulder blade.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, but this much is certain: Escobar was killed by a round that entered the center of his right ear and exited just in front of his left ear.

According to Hugo Martinez, the shooting then continued. Inside the house, Martin and his men fell to the floor as rounds fired by Search Bloc members on the street below crashed through the second-floor window and into the walls and ceiling.

Martin believed he and his men were taking fire from Escobar's bodyguards. He shouted into his radio, "Help! Help us! We need support!"

Finally, the gunfire stopped.

On the rooftop, Maj. Aguilar shouted: "It's Pablo! It's Pablo!"

Men were now scaling the roof. Someone found a ladder and placed it under the second-floor window, and others climbed down to the roof from the window.

Aguilar reached for the body on the roof and turned it over. The wide bearded face was splashed with blood and already it was beginning to swell. It was wreathed in long, blood-soaked black curls.

Aguilar grabbed a radio and spoke directly to Col. Martinez, speaking loudly enough for even the men on the street below to hear:

"Viva Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!"

It is difficult to reconstruct precisely what happened on the rooftop. Each Search Bloc member interviewed for this story provided an account based on what he had seen. Certain details differed. In some cases, these accounts included descriptions given to Search Bloc members by other witnesses.

Official reports said Escobar was shot dead as he ran across the rooftop during a gun battle with police. But a senior Colombian National Police commander now says Escobar was executed at close range. Autopsy reports and photos show that the fatal round went directly into his right ear.

"I believe it is true that Escobar was shot in the head after he was wounded on the rooftop," said Col. Oscar Naranjo, who was chief of intelligence for the Colombian National Police at the time. "You have to understand, the anxiety of that team was so high. Escobar was like a trophy at the end of a long hunt. For him to have been taken alive . . . no one wanted to attend that disaster."

Col. Martinez said there was "no point-blank 'coup de grace.' " He indicated that the fatal shot was fired from at least three feet away.

Maj. Aguilar told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that he fired the 9mm round into Escobar's ear, but he did not say from what distance.

Steve Murphy, a DEA agent working out of Medellin, was the first American on the scene. He had heard the news at Search Bloc headquarters, and had immediately phoned his boss Joe Toft in Bogota. Toft told him: "You better get your ass out there and bring pictures back."

Murphy grabbed a camera, ran outside and flagged down a police vehicle that was taking Col. Martinez to the killing scene.

They arrived as the colonel's men were setting up barricades. Crowds had begun to form as word spread that Escobar had been killed.

Murphy climbed to the second floor and was directed to look out the window to the rooftop. There he saw Escobar's barefoot body stretched on the orange roof tiles. Men from the raiding party stood around the bloodied corpse, sharing swigs from a bottle of Black Label Scotch.

Murphy shouted and the men posed for his camera, raising their rifles triumphantly. He climbed out to the roof and took more pictures, with more of the men posing around the slain fugitive.