Unlike his serene resting place, Pablo Escobar’s death was a fittingly violent end. After escaping prison in July 1992, a massive manhunt led Colombian National Police to the drug lord on December 2, 1993 — just one day after his birthday. Using electronic, antenna-based direction-finding equipment to track a call he had with his son, officials from the Search Bloc pinpointed the King of Cocaine’s location to the Los Olivos neighborhood in Medellin. A chase ensued, and his death reportedly came in a hail of bullets on the rooftops of his hometown barrio.
Gunshot wounds were located in his leg, torso, and ear, with the latter deemed the one that took him out. According to Business Insider, at the time of his death, Search Bloc leader Colonel Hugo Martinez — who was communicating with his team via radio — heard one of his soldiers scream, “Viva Colombia! “We have just killed Pablo Escobar!” But the crime lord’s family insists he died by suicide.
Speaking to The Sun in 2016, Escobar’s son Sebastian Marroquin said Escobar told him “the shot that would take his life would stick.” “I have the absolute certainty that my father committed suicide,” he told the outlet. “Coroners who did the autopsy were threatened and forced to change the official report.”
In an episode of the 2004 docuseries “Zero Hour,” Roberto Escobar said the same. “During all the years they went after him, he would say to me every day if he was really cornered without a way out, he would ‘shoot himself through the ears,'” he said. Escobar’s aunt, Luzmila Gaviria, agreed. “I don’t believe they killed him,” she said. “He killed himself. Because he used to say, ‘I’d prefer a grave in Colombia, to jail in the United States.'”
