Former DC Mayor Marion Barry Dies at 78 Divisive and flamboyant, maddening and beloved, Marion Barry outshone every politician in the 40-year history of District of Columbia self-rule. But for many, his legacy was not defined by the accomplishments and failures of his four terms as mayor and long service on the D.C. Council. Instead, Barry will be remembered for a single night in a downtown Washington hotel room and the grainy video that showed him lighting a crack pipe in the company of a much-younger woman. Barry died Sunday at 78. His family said in statement that Barry died early Sunday at the United Medical Center, after having been released from Howard University Hospital on Saturday. No cause of death was given, but his spokeswoman LaToya Foster said he collapsed outside his home. Speaking at a 4 a.m. press conference at United Medical Center, the city's mayor-elect Muriel Bowser called Barry an "inspiration to so many people and a fighter for people." "Mr. Barry, I can say this, lived up until the minute the way he wanted to live," said Bowser, who had served with Barry on the D.C. Council. The year was 1990, and crack cocaine had exploded in the district, turning it into the nation's murder capital. In his third term, the man known as the "Mayor for Life" became a symbol of a foundering city. Federal authorities had been investigating him for years for his alleged ties to drug suspects, and while he denied using drugs, his late-night partying was taking a toll on his job performance. His arrest on Jan. 18 was captured on an FBI videotape that showed Barry smoking what authorities said was crack at a Washington, D.C., hotel on Jan. 18. He famously cursed "Bitch set me up" when he was arrested, referring to the woman who had helped the FBI set up the sting. The arrest and subsequent conviction ? a jury deadlocked on most counts, convicting him of a single count of drug possession ? was a turning point for Barry. He had been elected to his first term as mayor in 1978 with broad support from across the city. With his good looks, charisma and background in the civil rights movement, he was embraced the dynamic leader the city's young government needed. The Washington Post endorsed him in each of his first three mayoral runs, although the 1986 endorsement was unenthusiastic. Barry's six-month term in federal prison was hardly the end of his political career. But it forever changed how it was perceived. To some, he was a pariah and an embarrassment. But to many district residents, particularly lower-income blacks, he was still a hero, someone unfairly persecuted for personal failures. Barry returned to the D.C. Council in 1992, representing the poorest of the city's eight wards. Two years later, he won his fourth and final term as mayor. The electorate was starkly divided along racial lines, and Barry advised those who had not supported his candidacy to "get over it." "Marion Barry changed America with his unmitigated gall to stand up in the ashes of where he had fallen and come back to win," poet Maya Angelou said in 1999. Barry's triumph, though, was short-lived. In 1995, with the city flirting with bankruptcy from years of bloated, unaccountable government, much of it under Barry, Congress stripped him of much of his power and installed a financial control board. Barry held authority over little more than the city's parks, libraries and community access cable TV station. He decided against seeking a fifth term.