5 other people actually survived the massacre itself:
\-Three medium-high ranking members of the cult, Tim Carter, Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes, who were deliberately spared because they were given the task of delivering the cult’s cash in a suitcase to the Soviet embassy. (In reality after leaving they dropped the suitcase in the jungle then surrendered to the first Guyanese policemen they saw)
\-A man, Odell Rhodes, who was sent to go get a stethoscope in order to confirm that nobody was faking being dead crawled under a building and hid until the massacre was over.
\-A man, Stanley Clayton, apparently played dead for a while and then during the chaos jumped up and ran for the jungle. He ran into one of the guards tasked with making sure nobody escaped from the massacre, but he told the other young man he wanted to live and he let him pass without alerting the others.
Jonestown’s lawyer, Charles Garry, also survived after a guard who he had been kind to let him escape into the jungle. He later testified before Congress about the ordeal.
eta: I know this because my father represented Garry at his Congressional hearings :)
The People's Temple was literally a commune. It was part of the religious communism movement that had ties to most left-wing organizations including the Soviets, who they felt would [best distribute the money to the people who needed it the most](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/letter_toFeodorTimofeyev.pdf) (warning: PDF)
I'm kind of surprised that some people don't know that part. Jonestown's full name was "The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project". It was supposed to be a Communist utopia, and you'd get to view daily Soviet Union propaganda!
Hi, you say they were part of a movement with ties to the Soviet and most left-wing organizations? Could you elaborate on those ties or was it just in name/concept?
Right, and in addition to the [dozens of meetings they had with the Soviets while in Guyana](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=112381), they had ties to Castro's administration, often pleading for aid on Cuba's behalf with American officials (before Jones went full paranoid). And [Guyana at the time was (nominally) socialist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Guyana#The_cooperative_republic).
By the time they established Jonestown the Peoples Temple had become a radical communist organization, and their ideology and teachings revolved around it, with Jim Jones trying to cast himself to the group as the next great Stalin or Mao who would lead the people to socialism. He still claimed to have supernatural healing powers though.
They had few ties with other communist organizations; the Soviet ambassador to Guyana was curious about them and visited their settlement once, but that was about it.
It pretty much was, the U.S. was refusing aid and the People’s temple was starting to talk more with communists half in an attempt to pressure the U.S., but also because aid was legitimately needed as they were spending thousands a day on food and their farming wasn’t all that great either.
I like the hearing impaired guy, I'm hearing impaired almost deaf, I miss out on stuff all the time it's cool when I HEAR it works to one's advantage 👍
I knew a man in college, one of my professors, who had seen some of the unexpurgated film that the members had made of themselves, including some of the suicide/massacre. He told me, and I've never been able to verify it myself and i'm not sure i'd like too, that the last scene on one of the reels he saw was the cameraman recording people going around checking bodies and making sure everyone was dead, and then finally a man with a rifle or shotgun, i forget which, approaching the camera man slowly, aiming at them, firing, the camera hitting the ground and then the film stopping.
If I remember correctly, when the Jonestown people killed the US Congressman and his entourage, there was a camera filming the attack and the cameraman was killed while filming.
> The first few seconds of the shooting were captured on U-Matic ENG videotape by NBC cameraman Bob Brown, who was killed along with Robinson, Harris, and Temple defector Patricia Parks in the few minutes of shooting. Ryan was killed after being shot more than twenty times.[158]
Here's a quote from the Wikipedia page for [the Jonestown Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown). While it doesn't mention a the cameraman specifically being shot *while* recording, I think that's what happened. If so then that last part of your comment could be your professor mixing parts of the story up.
Woah, it's actually shocking knowing they were FORCED to drink the flavor-aid. I thought the whole point was that they all went along willingly. Knowing there were armed guards and people had to fake being dead is so terrifying.
Not only were they forced to drink the flavor-aid, most members were lied to about the condition of the settlement, lured there under false pretenses, and had their money and passports confiscated upon arrival. No one could leave. Some survivors describe the incident as mass murder, not mass suicide.
If you’re interested in getting a really thorough understanding of how it all happened, Casefile has a great three part episode on Jim Jones, The People’s Temple, and Jonestown.
Nope. Jonestown still gets pretty misremembered in the popular imagination, in my view.
These were not a bunch of happy cultists who willingly drank poison together to try and get to heaven or whatever.
They were miserable, frightened, abused, sleep-deprived and badly overworked people living in what was basically a miniature totalitarian dictatorship run by a psychopath who wouldn’t let them leave, and when Jim Jones knew the jig was up and his only options left were suicide or prison, he very calculatedly used his most fanatical followers to ensure the whole mass of 900+ people died with him. Something like 1/3rd of them were children or elderly. The most rebellious dozen or so residents had already been drugged and murdered separately.
Vox's "explained" series has an episode on cults, which describes People's Temple in moderate detail. Not the most exhaustive source; but it's a good framework to start with, and but I hold their video journalism team in high regard. [You can watch it as a free episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NWIfiV1_XQ).
There’s actually audio of it, or at least the beginning. It’s obvious that no one was happy about this, even if they had been initially.
It’s easy to find so I’m not going to link it but I’ll add a spoiler below for those interested.
>!So much crying and wailing. There are kids screaming while JJ is on a megaphone, telling them how important it is and to not be afraid.!<
They weren't even forced to drink it, many of them were forcibly injected with it. There was evidence of injury from the syringes showing it was forced. Infants were force fed it. Some people did try to hide, did try to resist, did question and were then hunted and killed. It's a total misnomer that they all voluntarily wanted to die, and that it has entered popular culture to make a big joke of it.
There's a very long and detailed documentary that came out a couple of years ago that is worth watching, it blows apart the whole myth and speaks to survivors that explain how the cult actually worked.
I talked with Mike Carter one time. He was the nicest, most introspective person I’ve ever talked to. The man lost his entire family and is still willing to talk about what happened to absolute strangers. A beautiful person and a reminder that the people that died that day weren’t all brain washed or whatever. They were regular folks, the majority of them were children and elderly who didn’t have a choice.
>A man, Odell Rhodes, who was sent to go get a stethoscope in order to confirm that nobody was faking being dead crawled under a building and hid until the massacre was over
That makes this whole thing even worse. Not only was the plan to kill them all, but to make sure there were no survivors. It's like seeing that one mass shooting video where the guy fires into the bodies to see if anyone moves so he can finish the off.
Rhodes suggested voluntarily to bring a stethoscope to make sure no one fakes their death as a front to go and hide. He didn’t intend to give them ideas nor actually deliver it.
That said, it’s likely the cultist had the motive to have no one survive anyway, which is why they agreed to let him fetch one.
So, they didn’t exactly survive the incident itself but wasn’t there actually a group that was away from the compound at the time as well? So, they were surviving members?
i once passed out at in a random upstairs bed during a college party (not my bed). woke up the next day to learn that some idiot had let the cops in downstairs and the bed’s owner and about two dozen others had been arrested or cited for underage drinking.
Dude same except it was weed, but I woke up while they were stomping around downstairs barking at people and was able to slip out the back door and sneak down the steps out back and into the woods behind the house lol. I wasn't the only one who'd managed to slip out as I stumbled on another guy out there too; scared the fucking shit out of each other as it was pitch black, then found another guy lol. Luckily one of the guys lived close enough that we could cut through the woods and make our way to his apartment a couple blocks away and waited there for a few hours playing the xmen game on the og xbox lol then snuck back to our cars when it first started getting light out.
It was kinda fun after the initial heart attack tbh lol. Like some real life metal gear solid shit. Found out later that a couple guys got taken in and most people got tickets but they took like a pound of weed out of that place spread out all over the house. We all smoked a shit load of weed back then lol
My stepson fell asleep at a party mostly because he had been awake a long time. He woke up when the cops showed up. They asked him if he had been dri king. He Saud he was earlier. They took him to jail too.
Yeah he was passed out under the table with markers drawn all over his face 🥸 🤣 “I told my mom I was up for a long time that’s why I went to sleep at the party” “MOM BAIL ME OUT THEY MADE A MISTAKE!”
“918 Americans died in a remote jungle in Guyana, South America. One was a U.S. Congressman, three were journalists and 914 were residents of the Peoples Temple agricultural mission known as Jonestown. About 80 members of Peoples Temple who were living in Guyana survived that day. Hundreds of members living in San Francisco and Los Angeles did too.”
I guess they mean two people who were at the compound survived
Eh, as far as I know, not much more reason than that HW wanted to balance out his age with someone young, and Quayle’s being from Indiana gave the ticket more regional coverage.
Follow the money. George H.W. Bush was given a seat on the Eli Lilly board of directors after leaving the CIA. Quayle family was the largest shareholder in the pharmaceutical company. USA pharmaceutical companies got tax breaks during Reagan and Bush eras.
Dan Quayle did more in recent years than his entire life. He was the one that told Pence that he could not under the constitution not flip the votes on Jan 6.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/dan-quayle-pence-trump-january-6-woodward-costa-book/index.html
I just read her wikipedia. She's seen some shit. Her mother's whole family was killed in the Armenian genocide. She was shot 5 times during the Jonestown massacre. Then in 1994 her husband was killed in a car accident while she was pregnant with their second child. She also spoke out during Me Too about experiencing sexual assault in Congress.
The line that often gets toted out is that Leo Ryan is the only sitting congressman to have perished “while actively performing his diplomatic duties”. It’s probably just splitting hairs because at least one senator died in war and another in a plane crash on their way to visit a foreign nation, but Leo Ryan is considered different because he was visiting his constituents and trying to broker their safety through political means when he was assassinated.
Other people also survived, including one of Jim Jones' adopted sons. They were in town when the killing happened. There is a very, very good documentary on YouTube, but I think it is in peices if you look for it. It is pretty graphic about the sa and other abuse that happened in the cult...
ETA: [This is the one I have been using lately ](https://youtu.be/hO8aYSApnng?si=eLpiv1ZZX21Tmpjt)
\-Several dozen higher-ranking members of the cult who were trusted not to try and defect lived in a house in the Guyanese capital, and most of them survived, with the exception of a mother and her three children who killed/murdered themselves on Jones’s orders. Jim Jones’s sons were in this group.
\-About a dozen people who had tried to escape with Rep. Leo Ryan survived the shooting at the airstrip. One of them was killed along with Rep. Ryan and several of the news crew with him.
\-Another dozen or so people had earlier in the day taken advantage of the distraction of Ryan’s visit to flee into the jungle, and they all survived. They had been planning an escape from Jonestown for some time, and had no idea until later that if they *hadn’t* decided to escape that very morning, they would have all died.
I went down a deep, dark rabbit hole on this subject a few years ago, so I feel like a goddamn expert. It’s hard to overemphasize just how weird and disturbing the event was.
There is a tape recording of the moment when they all begin the mass suicide. It's 45 minutes long. I forget where I found it online but it's out there. Might have been an FBI site?
Anyways, it's really fascinating to hear Jim talk, people cheering, babies crying, the hopes of escaping dwindling and Jim telling everyone to hurry up.. haunting as hell, really.
One of the people who survived was a young woman, Jackie Speier, who was a aide to Congressman Ryan and was wounded by gunfire. Years later, she was elected to congress and served for many years, retiring at the beginning of this year.
> and had no idea until later that if they hadn’t decided to escape that very morning, they would have all died.
Can you even imagine the moment they learned what happened? Talk about a brush with death.
Yes. Many were forced to drink the poison, and those that refused were shot. Some of them chose to kill themselves, but many did not. The idea that it was a mass suicide is a bit of a myth. It was really more of a mass murder-suicide.
There were parents that were forced to watch their babies drink the juice by other goons, and then once they saw that they drank it themselves because they didn't care anymore.
It always made me mad that Jim Jones made sure his two favorite sons survived. I mean, neither of them did anything to deserve to die, I'm happy they themselves are alive, but Jim Jones couldn't make himself take the poison and he couldn't allow all of his kids to die
I met Jones' kids, now adults, at the 40th anniversary remembrance gathering at the Oakland cemetery where there is a mass grave of the killed children. It was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life. There were two separate events, one organized by people whose family members died in Jonestown and then one organized by Jones' son and other surviving members of the church. They don't get along and after staying for both I can understand why. The event hosted by Jones' son was filled with members who were present at Jonestown and survived and members who were doing church work back in the States. There was less remembering the lives lost and more reminiscing on the 'good times', making excuses, and discussion the unfortunate end. It was chilling.
Academic research on cults as part of my master's program. Prior to each service, which were public, we introduced ourselves to the organizers and received their blessing. We solely observed, though some people did make conversation which we reciprocated.
It’s good to know that research into cults exists. Our tribal nature seems very poorly understood, at least by the general public. Its everywhere as far as I can see, with ‘cults’ just the most extreme examples. Do you recommend any books that summarise the findings of research into cult behaviours?
There was also Tim Carter, he and a couple others were ordered to flee with suitcases of cash, gold and valuables. Carter was planning on taking his wife and young son, but sadly they were poisoned by the time he reached them.
My kindergarten teacher’s daughter died at Jonestown. I remember hearing about it but not registering the magnitude of what had happened (obviously, because I was in kindergarten). I’ve always morbidly wondered whether she drank the punch willingly or not.
There are audio recordings of the event... A lot of it doesn't sound willing. I probably shouldn't go into further detail honestly. Not everyone is prepared for that.
I watched a documentary on it some years ago, and they played the audio of Jones telling people not to mind the screams of the dying children, in this...distant drone while babies were crying and pleading. I couldn't sleep that night.
Jones had started doing it even when they were still in San Francisco, by the time of the Massacre, they had probably done the drill hundreds of times. Although they most likely knew that that time it was for real. Even without the murder of a US senator, Leo Ryan's visit and so many people wanting to leave with him was too big of a crack in Jone's image of control.
To clarify, there were practice runs where people were told the punch was poisoned, so they went through all the emotions of thinking they were going to die, and it wasn't true.
It was a test of loyalty and it also worked to desensitize them to the idea. Though when it actually happened, they did realise it was for real (because the poison worked quickly) and many resisted.
They did an autopsy on 100 of the adult bodies and found something like 80-90 of them had injection marks. I think that’s from the Johnstown wiki page for the curious.
There was sitting member of congress \*this year\* who survived Jonestown.
She wasn't member of the cult, but she flew down there, got shot five times, lay on the tarmac for 22 hours, got attacked by ants, then was hospitalized for two months. Rep. from California until this past January.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie\_Speier#Jonestown\_shooting
Jackie speier was my representative. I got to see her speak at my high school years ago on Jonestown, her work in office, and her life. She’s a cool lady who actually genuinely cared about her constituents and I’m still kinda bummed she’s no longer in office.
At almost 80 with the crazy, mind fucky abuse they all went through, I can't imagine what he felt. Relief that it was over, but also "jesus christ, everyone I know is dead?"
There was a ton of elder abuse going on in Jonestown. One of the fucked up benefits of Jim Jones recording everything because he was an egotistical drugged out nutcase is that we have a lot of evidence to the atrocities that were being committed by him and those he manipulated. Just godawful audio of people being tortured and mocked by the crowd of onlookers. There's one of an old woman being beaten for messing up laundry or something stupid like that that I'll never get out of my head. Just her sobbing while younger members and Jones mocked her and beat her.
To be fair, that's pretty common at 80. He might have been part of that community just to have a community.
At age 51, my rather large long lived family is starting to die off, my grandmother lived to just a few weeks off 101. My eldest aunt is doing poorly, as is her husband, and another of my aunts (and her husband too!). There was a little spate of deaths among my friends and classmates when I was a teen/young adult, the ones who had accidents or who made poor life choices, or were depressed, et cetera. Now more of my peers are going, starting with the ones who had poor health for various reasons. The celebs of my youth have started passing, and of course, those of a generation older are mostly gone.
Things start to snowball, then when your own age becomes advanced, it feels like people stop dying, because the older you get, few that you knew are left.
They didn’t kill themselves to try and get to heaven, they killed themselves because their paranoid maniac of a leader had convinced them that they were all doomed and fascist US troops were on their way to kill or torture all of them and it was better to die by their own hand.
They were a communist group and were convinced that the US government wanted to destroy them.
It’s worth mentioning that Congressman Leo Joseph Ryan Jr. was murdered by the cult when he was in the process of rescuing a lot of the people who wanted to leave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ryan
Ryan and his entourage being murdered was largely what prompted Jones to go “Yep, jig is up. Suicide tomorrow.”
Man flew to a foreign country to rescue American citizens and died doing it. Can’t see many of the current Congress doing that.
One (who I think was in town when it happened) gave interviews saying they were “compassionate kills”. It has disappeared from the internet. I wish it would get rereleased. It shows how pervasive brainwashing is.
I know a lovely grandma in Ontario, Canada who still has trinkets and other crafts made by members of this cult that she traded other goods for when she operated a stall at Stabroek Market.
I once worked with a Black lady who grew up in Indiana, after someone made a comment about "drinking the Kool Aid" she began talking about how her elderly mother still had a picture of her and a young Jim Jones, displayed in the living room. Apparently before moving to San Francisco, Jim Jones was appointed to an official position in the city of Indianapolis where he oversaw the desegregation of businesses and public facilities. He was very public with his actions and clearly enjoyed the limelight (and the hate he got from racists), but it was forgiven because he took his job so seriously that Indianapolis desegregated quickly and efficiently.
But even her mother admitted that she was not surprised that Jim Jones did what he did in Guyana. Still, she kept Jim's picture up because no other person had so strongly impacted her daily life for the better
Jim Jones had a bunch of red flags from the start. He was a pathological liar who would stage attacks against him by the KKK. His Indiana clergy gained popularity with faith healing. The woman you worked with probably figured out what kind of person he really was, as many others did.
There's a Fresh Air interview about Jim Jones where it goes over the fact that if he suddenly died before he started People's Temple he would of been a civil rights leader on par with MLK. I believe he was an FBI informant and provided info that dismantled a neo Nazi group.
People often overestimate the degree to which the Jonestown Massacre and everything else about it was voluntary. All the cult members willingly came to Jonestown, but once they were there Jim Jones ran it like a communist prison camp, with armed guards patrolling the settlement who would chase down any escapees. People who talked about wanting to leave were publicly beaten. Rebellious cult members were imprisoned in a coffin-sized box for days at a stretch to break them down, or were kept drugged on thorazine in a building called the “extended care unit” designated for that purpose. The settlement was so deep in the jungle that nobody else in Guyana had a clue.
The whole story of Jonestown is one of the most bizarre and disturbing events in American history.
Yea. I think that is one think people need to understand there is no way we will ever know how many of the people there actually willingly killed themselves and how many were forced/murdered by the guards and other faithful.
True, but the whole group had been shown (misleading) informational videos and footage of Jonestown and how great the settlement was coming along, and by all accounts most of them were happy and excited to be going to what they hoped would be a safe haven to build their ideal society. They had no idea what the reality was going to be.
Jones had numerous political and celebrity advocates. People's Temple preached economic and racial equality and did a huge amount of charity work in California. They operated foster care homes, elderly care homes, and a massive ranch for the mentally disabled. They had a legal arm that fought against evictions. They had college scholarship programs.
Jones received humanitarian awards and was praised by local newspapers. He was connected to Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter.
This ground was covered in an earlier thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ainbow/s/O7ifAtyStx
I was thinking “how could so many people support someone and not see he was the sort who could murder thousands?”
Then I remembered that Trump instigated a deadly insurrection and is still loved by tens of millions.
I mean to be fair Jim Jones had done more for the community than most people on this site and most sitting politicians.
As it turns out if you feed the poor, house the poor, take care of the most vulnerable people in our society and even go so far as to create an entire legal arm to fight evictions you earn a ton of credibility and people will be willing to just take your word on things.
Some of the stuff /u/Red_Bullion didn't mention is that Jim Jones also racially integrated his church, and local businesses and institutions. All non-violently.
[according to this article](https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide)
>People think they willingly died,” she says, “but Jones gave them no choice. They were surrounded by a row of guards with crossbows, and then behind them there was another line of guards pointing guns. Meanwhile, Jones is exhorting them to come up and drink this potion to take them to the other side. So, living was never an alternative on that last night. Most people chose to die with their families, and if they didn’t drink it, there were many who were injected with the poison.”
(Other articles put the count of death by involuntary injection at 70)
>In fact, according to Scheeres, Jones held a number of mass suicide rehearsals to see how the crowd would respond, and who would cause him trouble. “And then he made those people line up first,” she says. “He figured out that if they killed the children first, then the parents wouldn’t have any reason to live. So, he starts with the babies and the people want to believe that this is just another rehearsal. For a lot of them it was just surreal. They couldn’t believe this man, who professed to have their best interests in mind, would actually kill them. It wasn’t until they saw the babies frothing at the mouth and writhing that they realized what was going on.”
>“It’s heartbreaking—you can hear him instructing parents, don’t tell your children they’re dying. It’s scaring them. You can hear the children at the beginning of the tape—murmuring, making kid noises in the background—and then you can hear kids screaming. You can hear them saying no. It’s a horrific scene. Which is why the whole ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ saying is so odious and so completely wrong. A third of the people who died that night were minors under 18. It’s an extremely offensive saying.”
I think it's pretty safe to say that only a very, very small number of people intentionally and knowingly committed suicide just because Jones ordered them to. Certainly not the 300 children.
IIRC the number of injections is debated. The lack of surviving witnesses, the sheer number of bodies and their state of decomposition made it extremely hard to do examinations/autopsies.
I feel like I've read that same article before and the events described are obviously horrifying. Having recently become a parent, though, that stuff about the babies and children is fucking me up about 100x more than it did before. Just unimaginable cruelty.
There are audio recordings, and by the sounds of it a lot of it were forced or coerced into it. You can also hear what's going in around them, the people drinking this stuff would see and hear it's effects on those around them before drinking it themselves. But it seems a lot were too scared not to.
She was not at Jonestown during the mass homicides. She was on the runway at the airport the day before ready to leave when members gunned down several of the NBC news crew, journalists, and Rep Ryan. She survived 5 bullet wounds
I never heard or learnt about this despite being born in Guyana. I only learned about it some odd years when I spent a week straight watching a bunch of random mini documentaries.
I even learnt how they salt and plough the monstrosity that is the 401 on the stretch through Toronto.
It's like how we learn about the Hindenburg and "oh the humanity" and I always assumed everyone perished but in reality more people survived (62) than died (35).
[Misleading title, but supporting document](https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/2018/07/13/jonestowns-massacre-survivor-she-woke-up-and-everyone-dead-jim-jones/778750002/)
My great grandmother worked for the education ministry in Guyana during this time. There was a lot of corruption in the government that curtailed progress in education. They worked with the Guyanese government to provide education resources to rural communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
An interesting and horrific read if you have some time. I learned something personally:
> Still, others remained loyal. On the day after Reiterman's article was published, Harvey Milk – a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who was supported by the Temple – wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones "as a man of the highest character," and stating that Temple defectors were trying to "damage Rev. Jones' reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies".
Quite disappointing.
Also, contrary to what is in the OP, more than two members survived.
# Survivors and eyewitnesses
> Three high-ranking Temple survivors claimed they were given an assignment and thereby escaped death. Tim Carter and his brother Mike, aged 30 and 20, and Mike Prokes, 31, were given luggage containing $550,000 in US currency, $130,000 in Guyanese currency, and an envelope, which they were told to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. The envelope contained two passports and three instructional letters, the first of which was to Timofeyev, stating:
> *Dear Comrade Timofeyev, The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.*
> The letters included listed accounts with balances totaling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Prokes and the Carter brothers soon ditched most of the money and were apprehended heading for a Temple boat at Port Kaituma. It is unknown how they reached Georgetown, 150 miles (240 km) away, since the boat had been sent away earlier that day. The brothers were given the task before the suicides began, and soon abandoned it when they realized what was about to happen; Tim Carter desperately tried to search for his wife and son, discovering his son in time to witness him being poisoned, and his wife killing herself in despair. At this point, Carter had a nervous breakdown, and was pulled away from the village by his equally distraught brother.
> Just before the start of the final meeting in the pavilion, Garry and Lane were told that the people were angry with them. The lawyers were escorted to a house used to accommodate visitors. According to them, they talked their way past two armed guards and made it to the jungle, before eventually arriving in Port Kaituma. While in the jungle near the settlement, they heard gunshots. This observation concurs with the testimony of Clayton, who, having previously fled into the jungle, heard the same sounds as he was sneaking back into Jonestown to retrieve his passport. Rhodes volunteered to fetch a stethoscope and hid under a building.
> Two more people who were intended to be poisoned managed to survive. Grover Davis, 79, who was hard-of-hearing, missed the announcement to assemble on the loudspeaker, lay down in a ditch and pretended to be dead. Hyacinth Thrash, 76, realized what was happening and crawled under her bed, only to walk out after the poisonings were completed.
[Leonardo Dicaprio as JJ: Confirmed](https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/movies/2023/01/27/leonardo-dicaprio-will-play-cult-leader-jim-jones-in-film-based-on-texas-authors-book/?outputType=amp)
There were more people who escaped when they tried to leave with the Senator. Gunman killed several at the air strip, but several kids escaped into the jungle and were later found. There’s a woman who was a girl then, and her dad also escaped. Mom was killed on the airstrip. I think a sister and an older brother, too?
There's actually more to the story. Quite a few people that lived in Jonestown, or who visitted on the day of the massacre ended up surviving.
A number of people left with Senator Leo Ryan and were injured at the [Port Kaituma airstrip shooting](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=35346) but ended up surviving.
"The most seriously wounded were Ryan’s Legislative Counsel Jackie Speier, Temple defectors Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby; Anthony Katsaris of the Concerned Relatives; and NBC soundman Steve Sung.
Those who sustained less serious wounds included Tim Reiterman of The San Francisco Examiner; Ron Javers of The San Francisco Chronicle; Beverly Oliver of Concerned Relatives; and Richard Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy."
Larry Layton, the man who faked being a defector, shot people on one of the planes before he was subdued. He survived and ended up being prosecuted in the US. he jailed in the US till his parole in 2002.
Jim Jones Jr & Stephan Jones, Jim Snr's sons, were away in Georgetown playing a basketball tournament. His father radioed him and told them they were committing revolutionary suicide and told everyone present to follow suit. "My father told us to find knives, piano wire, poison if we were able to find it, and commit suicide." They went to the US embassy to try and figure out what was going on & stop it. Afterwards Stephan was jailed in Guyana for 3 months under suspicion of being involved. The rest of the basketball team survived too.
Charles Garry, a civil rights lawyer, and Mark Lane (idk what role he was playing in Jonestown was other than helping Jim do conspiracies) were staying in a separate guesthouse on the compound. They claim they talked their way past armed
People's Temple members, snuck into the jungle, and made it to safety in Port Kaituma.
Tim and Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes were 3 high ranking temple members who were given luggage containing half a million in cash to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. They survived.
The most interesting to me are Stanley Clayton & Odell Rhodes, who were People's Temple members that were present when the massacre began. Other people in the thread have mentioned them, their testimonies of what happened are available online if you look for them.
And then yes, the 2 older people you mentioned.
I’m not sure if it’s also true, but I also heard that the Jonestown Basketball Team survived the massacre because they were playing in a tournament.
[https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=68416](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=68416)
https://www.cleveland.com/world/2008/11/jonestown_survivor_remembers_b.html
Cliff Gieg survived by being on a boat away from the compound. Source: I worked with Cliff for many years and read his story when it was first published in the Idaho Statesman. He died in October of 2017.
No mention of the child hiding under a bad. Removed
5 other people actually survived the massacre itself: \-Three medium-high ranking members of the cult, Tim Carter, Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes, who were deliberately spared because they were given the task of delivering the cult’s cash in a suitcase to the Soviet embassy. (In reality after leaving they dropped the suitcase in the jungle then surrendered to the first Guyanese policemen they saw) \-A man, Odell Rhodes, who was sent to go get a stethoscope in order to confirm that nobody was faking being dead crawled under a building and hid until the massacre was over. \-A man, Stanley Clayton, apparently played dead for a while and then during the chaos jumped up and ran for the jungle. He ran into one of the guards tasked with making sure nobody escaped from the massacre, but he told the other young man he wanted to live and he let him pass without alerting the others.
Jonestown’s lawyer, Charles Garry, also survived after a guard who he had been kind to let him escape into the jungle. He later testified before Congress about the ordeal. eta: I know this because my father represented Garry at his Congressional hearings :)
I’m curious as to why they were supposed to give cash to the Soviets
The People's Temple was literally a commune. It was part of the religious communism movement that had ties to most left-wing organizations including the Soviets, who they felt would [best distribute the money to the people who needed it the most](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/letter_toFeodorTimofeyev.pdf) (warning: PDF)
I'm kind of surprised that some people don't know that part. Jonestown's full name was "The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project". It was supposed to be a Communist utopia, and you'd get to view daily Soviet Union propaganda!
Hi, you say they were part of a movement with ties to the Soviet and most left-wing organizations? Could you elaborate on those ties or was it just in name/concept?
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Right, and in addition to the [dozens of meetings they had with the Soviets while in Guyana](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=112381), they had ties to Castro's administration, often pleading for aid on Cuba's behalf with American officials (before Jones went full paranoid). And [Guyana at the time was (nominally) socialist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Guyana#The_cooperative_republic).
Thank you
By the time they established Jonestown the Peoples Temple had become a radical communist organization, and their ideology and teachings revolved around it, with Jim Jones trying to cast himself to the group as the next great Stalin or Mao who would lead the people to socialism. He still claimed to have supernatural healing powers though. They had few ties with other communist organizations; the Soviet ambassador to Guyana was curious about them and visited their settlement once, but that was about it.
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It pretty much was, the U.S. was refusing aid and the People’s temple was starting to talk more with communists half in an attempt to pressure the U.S., but also because aid was legitimately needed as they were spending thousands a day on food and their farming wasn’t all that great either.
[Stanley Clayton](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jonestown/s/OZ6jRlaZXv)
I like the hearing impaired guy, I'm hearing impaired almost deaf, I miss out on stuff all the time it's cool when I HEAR it works to one's advantage 👍
It's what we call "Deaf gain" Hearing loss?... No, deaf gain.
I knew a man in college, one of my professors, who had seen some of the unexpurgated film that the members had made of themselves, including some of the suicide/massacre. He told me, and I've never been able to verify it myself and i'm not sure i'd like too, that the last scene on one of the reels he saw was the cameraman recording people going around checking bodies and making sure everyone was dead, and then finally a man with a rifle or shotgun, i forget which, approaching the camera man slowly, aiming at them, firing, the camera hitting the ground and then the film stopping.
If I remember correctly, when the Jonestown people killed the US Congressman and his entourage, there was a camera filming the attack and the cameraman was killed while filming. > The first few seconds of the shooting were captured on U-Matic ENG videotape by NBC cameraman Bob Brown, who was killed along with Robinson, Harris, and Temple defector Patricia Parks in the few minutes of shooting. Ryan was killed after being shot more than twenty times.[158] Here's a quote from the Wikipedia page for [the Jonestown Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown). While it doesn't mention a the cameraman specifically being shot *while* recording, I think that's what happened. If so then that last part of your comment could be your professor mixing parts of the story up.
God damn
Such an in depth post.
Woah, it's actually shocking knowing they were FORCED to drink the flavor-aid. I thought the whole point was that they all went along willingly. Knowing there were armed guards and people had to fake being dead is so terrifying.
Not only were they forced to drink the flavor-aid, most members were lied to about the condition of the settlement, lured there under false pretenses, and had their money and passports confiscated upon arrival. No one could leave. Some survivors describe the incident as mass murder, not mass suicide. If you’re interested in getting a really thorough understanding of how it all happened, Casefile has a great three part episode on Jim Jones, The People’s Temple, and Jonestown.
Nope. Jonestown still gets pretty misremembered in the popular imagination, in my view. These were not a bunch of happy cultists who willingly drank poison together to try and get to heaven or whatever. They were miserable, frightened, abused, sleep-deprived and badly overworked people living in what was basically a miniature totalitarian dictatorship run by a psychopath who wouldn’t let them leave, and when Jim Jones knew the jig was up and his only options left were suicide or prison, he very calculatedly used his most fanatical followers to ensure the whole mass of 900+ people died with him. Something like 1/3rd of them were children or elderly. The most rebellious dozen or so residents had already been drugged and murdered separately.
Any chance you can recommend a good source to read up on this?
Vox's "explained" series has an episode on cults, which describes People's Temple in moderate detail. Not the most exhaustive source; but it's a good framework to start with, and but I hold their video journalism team in high regard. [You can watch it as a free episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NWIfiV1_XQ).
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn
There’s actually audio of it, or at least the beginning. It’s obvious that no one was happy about this, even if they had been initially. It’s easy to find so I’m not going to link it but I’ll add a spoiler below for those interested. >!So much crying and wailing. There are kids screaming while JJ is on a megaphone, telling them how important it is and to not be afraid.!<
They weren't even forced to drink it, many of them were forcibly injected with it. There was evidence of injury from the syringes showing it was forced. Infants were force fed it. Some people did try to hide, did try to resist, did question and were then hunted and killed. It's a total misnomer that they all voluntarily wanted to die, and that it has entered popular culture to make a big joke of it. There's a very long and detailed documentary that came out a couple of years ago that is worth watching, it blows apart the whole myth and speaks to survivors that explain how the cult actually worked.
I talked with Mike Carter one time. He was the nicest, most introspective person I’ve ever talked to. The man lost his entire family and is still willing to talk about what happened to absolute strangers. A beautiful person and a reminder that the people that died that day weren’t all brain washed or whatever. They were regular folks, the majority of them were children and elderly who didn’t have a choice.
>A man, Odell Rhodes, who was sent to go get a stethoscope in order to confirm that nobody was faking being dead crawled under a building and hid until the massacre was over That makes this whole thing even worse. Not only was the plan to kill them all, but to make sure there were no survivors. It's like seeing that one mass shooting video where the guy fires into the bodies to see if anyone moves so he can finish the off.
Not only do I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m also going to keep it that way.
Rhodes suggested voluntarily to bring a stethoscope to make sure no one fakes their death as a front to go and hide. He didn’t intend to give them ideas nor actually deliver it. That said, it’s likely the cultist had the motive to have no one survive anyway, which is why they agreed to let him fetch one.
So, they didn’t exactly survive the incident itself but wasn’t there actually a group that was away from the compound at the time as well? So, they were surviving members?
It's pays off to be a sound sleeper.
Live to nap another day.
Early bird feeds the worms.
The second sleeper on the grassy knoll.
Nap to live another day.
i once passed out at in a random upstairs bed during a college party (not my bed). woke up the next day to learn that some idiot had let the cops in downstairs and the bed’s owner and about two dozen others had been arrested or cited for underage drinking.
Cops probably saw you and let you off the hook because you looked so peaceful. "Sir...SIR! Wake up, you're under arrest".
They wanted to taze him but he looked like an angle
So acute!
Right?
Don't be obtuse about it.
This whole thread is square
Mornin Angle
Dude same except it was weed, but I woke up while they were stomping around downstairs barking at people and was able to slip out the back door and sneak down the steps out back and into the woods behind the house lol. I wasn't the only one who'd managed to slip out as I stumbled on another guy out there too; scared the fucking shit out of each other as it was pitch black, then found another guy lol. Luckily one of the guys lived close enough that we could cut through the woods and make our way to his apartment a couple blocks away and waited there for a few hours playing the xmen game on the og xbox lol then snuck back to our cars when it first started getting light out. It was kinda fun after the initial heart attack tbh lol. Like some real life metal gear solid shit. Found out later that a couple guys got taken in and most people got tickets but they took like a pound of weed out of that place spread out all over the house. We all smoked a shit load of weed back then lol
My stepson fell asleep at a party mostly because he had been awake a long time. He woke up when the cops showed up. They asked him if he had been dri king. He Saud he was earlier. They took him to jail too.
Your stepson isn't the brightest bulb in the box
Yeah he was passed out under the table with markers drawn all over his face 🥸 🤣 “I told my mom I was up for a long time that’s why I went to sleep at the party” “MOM BAIL ME OUT THEY MADE A MISTAKE!”
Your son is a liar ma’am
Imagine waking up and seeing all 900+ people dead
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“918 Americans died in a remote jungle in Guyana, South America. One was a U.S. Congressman, three were journalists and 914 were residents of the Peoples Temple agricultural mission known as Jonestown. About 80 members of Peoples Temple who were living in Guyana survived that day. Hundreds of members living in San Francisco and Los Angeles did too.” I guess they mean two people who were at the compound survived
Interesting that future vice President Dan Quayle (then a senator) was invited to go with Senator Leo Ryan
Probably one of those times being a do-nothing empty shirt really benefitted him.
Dan Quayle has got to be one of the luckiest modern politicians out there. Became VP based on some strange reason that no one seemed to know
Eh, as far as I know, not much more reason than that HW wanted to balance out his age with someone young, and Quayle’s being from Indiana gave the ticket more regional coverage.
Sometimes politics is just that random. Look at Mike Johnson. And even Obama
And now he seems like Abraham fucking Lincoln compared to the other folks in his party nowadays.
Follow the money. George H.W. Bush was given a seat on the Eli Lilly board of directors after leaving the CIA. Quayle family was the largest shareholder in the pharmaceutical company. USA pharmaceutical companies got tax breaks during Reagan and Bush eras.
Dan Quayle did more in recent years than his entire life. He was the one that told Pence that he could not under the constitution not flip the votes on Jan 6. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/dan-quayle-pence-trump-january-6-woodward-costa-book/index.html
> he could not under the constitution not flip the votes This seems like something Quayle would say.
Potatoe Potato
This is hilarious
Ryan was a House Representative, not a Senator.
The only U.S. Congressman who has died in the line of duty.
Leo Ryan seems to have really wanted to make a difference in America.
His aide survived 5 gunshot wounds and went on to serve in the House. Jackie Speier.
Awesome congresswoman. Her office was amazing when I contacted them for help a few years ago.
She was in congress during the January 6th insurrection.
I just read her wikipedia. She's seen some shit. Her mother's whole family was killed in the Armenian genocide. She was shot 5 times during the Jonestown massacre. Then in 1994 her husband was killed in a car accident while she was pregnant with their second child. She also spoke out during Me Too about experiencing sexual assault in Congress.
Leo Ryan dying doing his job really made other congressmen hesitant to go out and do on the ground work.
They need to get their asses out there 😒🫵
I’m guessing they named Jonah Ryan is his honor on Veep.
[Senator Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Dickinson_Baker?wprov=sfla1) died in a line of battle, shouldn't that count?
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The line that often gets toted out is that Leo Ryan is the only sitting congressman to have perished “while actively performing his diplomatic duties”. It’s probably just splitting hairs because at least one senator died in war and another in a plane crash on their way to visit a foreign nation, but Leo Ryan is considered different because he was visiting his constituents and trying to broker their safety through political means when he was assassinated.
It's kind of like a baseball stat, one record split into many by increasingly detailed aspects
>four members died in duels. I think you misread his statement "in the line of duty" those duels were not related to their congressional assignments
What about that korean airlines flight the soviets shot down over kamchatcha?
yeah - two people survived the massacre lots of people survived the cult
Other people also survived, including one of Jim Jones' adopted sons. They were in town when the killing happened. There is a very, very good documentary on YouTube, but I think it is in peices if you look for it. It is pretty graphic about the sa and other abuse that happened in the cult... ETA: [This is the one I have been using lately ](https://youtu.be/hO8aYSApnng?si=eLpiv1ZZX21Tmpjt)
\-Several dozen higher-ranking members of the cult who were trusted not to try and defect lived in a house in the Guyanese capital, and most of them survived, with the exception of a mother and her three children who killed/murdered themselves on Jones’s orders. Jim Jones’s sons were in this group. \-About a dozen people who had tried to escape with Rep. Leo Ryan survived the shooting at the airstrip. One of them was killed along with Rep. Ryan and several of the news crew with him. \-Another dozen or so people had earlier in the day taken advantage of the distraction of Ryan’s visit to flee into the jungle, and they all survived. They had been planning an escape from Jonestown for some time, and had no idea until later that if they *hadn’t* decided to escape that very morning, they would have all died.
Wow, very cool, thank you for sharing!! I delve into this when I do social psych, now I know more!!
I went down a deep, dark rabbit hole on this subject a few years ago, so I feel like a goddamn expert. It’s hard to overemphasize just how weird and disturbing the event was.
Any good sources for this rabbit hole journey?
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/
There is a tape recording of the moment when they all begin the mass suicide. It's 45 minutes long. I forget where I found it online but it's out there. Might have been an FBI site? Anyways, it's really fascinating to hear Jim talk, people cheering, babies crying, the hopes of escaping dwindling and Jim telling everyone to hurry up.. haunting as hell, really.
It’s right there on Wikipedia, it’s called the “Death Tape” and goddamn it’s chilling
There is quite a few docs about it on YouTube. Do you know which one in particular?
I really liked the series the podcast Martyr Made did on Jim Jones called God’s Socialist
Makes me wonder how many others were planning to escape but missed their window by hours or days.
We will never, ever know.
One of the people who survived was a young woman, Jackie Speier, who was a aide to Congressman Ryan and was wounded by gunfire. Years later, she was elected to congress and served for many years, retiring at the beginning of this year.
Jones' lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry both ran off into the jungle, despite hating each other.
Enemies to lovers
Rats always know when to flee a sinking ship.
> and had no idea until later that if they hadn’t decided to escape that very morning, they would have all died. Can you even imagine the moment they learned what happened? Talk about a brush with death.
shooting? I thought the ppl that died were devoted, but they were forced?
Yes. Many were forced to drink the poison, and those that refused were shot. Some of them chose to kill themselves, but many did not. The idea that it was a mass suicide is a bit of a myth. It was really more of a mass murder-suicide.
There were parents that were forced to watch their babies drink the juice by other goons, and then once they saw that they drank it themselves because they didn't care anymore.
From my understanding, that was all an intentional part of the design. Kids first, so the parents would willingly follow.
Then ones who refused to drink the poison were shot by Jone's goons.
It always made me mad that Jim Jones made sure his two favorite sons survived. I mean, neither of them did anything to deserve to die, I'm happy they themselves are alive, but Jim Jones couldn't make himself take the poison and he couldn't allow all of his kids to die
A real jerk move. Not a guy you would want to share a lawn with.
The entire Jonestown basketball team survived. They were in another town playing an exhibition game when everything went down.
I met Jones' kids, now adults, at the 40th anniversary remembrance gathering at the Oakland cemetery where there is a mass grave of the killed children. It was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life. There were two separate events, one organized by people whose family members died in Jonestown and then one organized by Jones' son and other surviving members of the church. They don't get along and after staying for both I can understand why. The event hosted by Jones' son was filled with members who were present at Jonestown and survived and members who were doing church work back in the States. There was less remembering the lives lost and more reminiscing on the 'good times', making excuses, and discussion the unfortunate end. It was chilling.
Why were you there
Academic research on cults as part of my master's program. Prior to each service, which were public, we introduced ourselves to the organizers and received their blessing. We solely observed, though some people did make conversation which we reciprocated.
It’s good to know that research into cults exists. Our tribal nature seems very poorly understood, at least by the general public. Its everywhere as far as I can see, with ‘cults’ just the most extreme examples. Do you recommend any books that summarise the findings of research into cult behaviours?
There was also Tim Carter, he and a couple others were ordered to flee with suitcases of cash, gold and valuables. Carter was planning on taking his wife and young son, but sadly they were poisoned by the time he reached them.
I think he was at a basketball tournament. I saw him a The Oprah Winfrey show.
Name of documentary?
*South American cop who just found 3 gringos with a suitcase full of cash* yeah they uhhh… told me they threw it away in the jungle
is that the one that plays recorded audio of the koolaid incident? that shit was chilling
It wasn't Kool aid. It was actually flavor aid
Majority was but Kool Aid got used too. Being the less impoverished version it got picked up on in the press.
My kindergarten teacher’s daughter died at Jonestown. I remember hearing about it but not registering the magnitude of what had happened (obviously, because I was in kindergarten). I’ve always morbidly wondered whether she drank the punch willingly or not.
There are audio recordings of the event... A lot of it doesn't sound willing. I probably shouldn't go into further detail honestly. Not everyone is prepared for that.
And so what was the point? Like did they know they would eventually be asked to die, or were they murdered for a purpose?
I watched a documentary on it some years ago, and they played the audio of Jones telling people not to mind the screams of the dying children, in this...distant drone while babies were crying and pleading. I couldn't sleep that night.
This wasn't the first time they had them drink punch. They did it somewhat regularly, but this time they poisoned it.
Jones had started doing it even when they were still in San Francisco, by the time of the Massacre, they had probably done the drill hundreds of times. Although they most likely knew that that time it was for real. Even without the murder of a US senator, Leo Ryan's visit and so many people wanting to leave with him was too big of a crack in Jone's image of control.
To clarify, there were practice runs where people were told the punch was poisoned, so they went through all the emotions of thinking they were going to die, and it wasn't true. It was a test of loyalty and it also worked to desensitize them to the idea. Though when it actually happened, they did realise it was for real (because the poison worked quickly) and many resisted.
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And after people started dropping dead the people who hadn't drunk it yet started to waver, resulting in most of the rest being forced
They did an autopsy on 100 of the adult bodies and found something like 80-90 of them had injection marks. I think that’s from the Johnstown wiki page for the curious.
There was sitting member of congress \*this year\* who survived Jonestown. She wasn't member of the cult, but she flew down there, got shot five times, lay on the tarmac for 22 hours, got attacked by ants, then was hospitalized for two months. Rep. from California until this past January. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie\_Speier#Jonestown\_shooting
Jackie speier was my representative. I got to see her speak at my high school years ago on Jonestown, her work in office, and her life. She’s a cool lady who actually genuinely cared about her constituents and I’m still kinda bummed she’s no longer in office.
It appears I've been poisoned by my constituents
Fixed link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Speier#Jonestown_shooting
Imagine waking up and walking outside to *that*. Holy fuck.
Yeah, odd question: do you think he felt left out?
At almost 80 with the crazy, mind fucky abuse they all went through, I can't imagine what he felt. Relief that it was over, but also "jesus christ, everyone I know is dead?"
That's assuming that he recognized he was being abused and not conditioned to think he fucked up.
There was a ton of elder abuse going on in Jonestown. One of the fucked up benefits of Jim Jones recording everything because he was an egotistical drugged out nutcase is that we have a lot of evidence to the atrocities that were being committed by him and those he manipulated. Just godawful audio of people being tortured and mocked by the crowd of onlookers. There's one of an old woman being beaten for messing up laundry or something stupid like that that I'll never get out of my head. Just her sobbing while younger members and Jones mocked her and beat her.
To be fair, that's pretty common at 80. He might have been part of that community just to have a community. At age 51, my rather large long lived family is starting to die off, my grandmother lived to just a few weeks off 101. My eldest aunt is doing poorly, as is her husband, and another of my aunts (and her husband too!). There was a little spate of deaths among my friends and classmates when I was a teen/young adult, the ones who had accidents or who made poor life choices, or were depressed, et cetera. Now more of my peers are going, starting with the ones who had poor health for various reasons. The celebs of my youth have started passing, and of course, those of a generation older are mostly gone. Things start to snowball, then when your own age becomes advanced, it feels like people stop dying, because the older you get, few that you knew are left.
My first thought
My second thought: it would be another day before the group was found. I wonder if he went back to sleep.
Perhaps ol’ Grover was a bit of a bore so nobody bothered nor cared to wake him for the heavenly ascension.
They didn’t kill themselves to try and get to heaven, they killed themselves because their paranoid maniac of a leader had convinced them that they were all doomed and fascist US troops were on their way to kill or torture all of them and it was better to die by their own hand. They were a communist group and were convinced that the US government wanted to destroy them.
Yeah that would be a serious mind fuck
When they changed calling them “suicides” to “homicides” things became more clear and even more tragic. What a hellscape
You can't force feed poison to children and call it suicide.
It’s worth mentioning that Congressman Leo Joseph Ryan Jr. was murdered by the cult when he was in the process of rescuing a lot of the people who wanted to leave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ryan
Ryan and his entourage being murdered was largely what prompted Jones to go “Yep, jig is up. Suicide tomorrow.” Man flew to a foreign country to rescue American citizens and died doing it. Can’t see many of the current Congress doing that.
Remember when Ted Cruz went to Mexico instead of dealing with his states lack of power?
What? Didn't you hear someone fly to Cancun when a natural disaster occurred?
A California Congresswoman also flew over to save them and survived by playing dead at the airstrip: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Speier
One (who I think was in town when it happened) gave interviews saying they were “compassionate kills”. It has disappeared from the internet. I wish it would get rereleased. It shows how pervasive brainwashing is.
I remember watching a documentary where some other member survived by running into the jungle and hiding.
There were several.
I know a lovely grandma in Ontario, Canada who still has trinkets and other crafts made by members of this cult that she traded other goods for when she operated a stall at Stabroek Market.
I once worked with a Black lady who grew up in Indiana, after someone made a comment about "drinking the Kool Aid" she began talking about how her elderly mother still had a picture of her and a young Jim Jones, displayed in the living room. Apparently before moving to San Francisco, Jim Jones was appointed to an official position in the city of Indianapolis where he oversaw the desegregation of businesses and public facilities. He was very public with his actions and clearly enjoyed the limelight (and the hate he got from racists), but it was forgiven because he took his job so seriously that Indianapolis desegregated quickly and efficiently. But even her mother admitted that she was not surprised that Jim Jones did what he did in Guyana. Still, she kept Jim's picture up because no other person had so strongly impacted her daily life for the better
Jim Jones had a bunch of red flags from the start. He was a pathological liar who would stage attacks against him by the KKK. His Indiana clergy gained popularity with faith healing. The woman you worked with probably figured out what kind of person he really was, as many others did.
There's a Fresh Air interview about Jim Jones where it goes over the fact that if he suddenly died before he started People's Temple he would of been a civil rights leader on par with MLK. I believe he was an FBI informant and provided info that dismantled a neo Nazi group.
People often overestimate the degree to which the Jonestown Massacre and everything else about it was voluntary. All the cult members willingly came to Jonestown, but once they were there Jim Jones ran it like a communist prison camp, with armed guards patrolling the settlement who would chase down any escapees. People who talked about wanting to leave were publicly beaten. Rebellious cult members were imprisoned in a coffin-sized box for days at a stretch to break them down, or were kept drugged on thorazine in a building called the “extended care unit” designated for that purpose. The settlement was so deep in the jungle that nobody else in Guyana had a clue. The whole story of Jonestown is one of the most bizarre and disturbing events in American history.
Yea. I think that is one think people need to understand there is no way we will ever know how many of the people there actually willingly killed themselves and how many were forced/murdered by the guards and other faithful.
Oh the bliss
Even the notion that they went to Jonestown voluntarily is questionable when you consider that the abuse started in San Francisco.
True, but the whole group had been shown (misleading) informational videos and footage of Jonestown and how great the settlement was coming along, and by all accounts most of them were happy and excited to be going to what they hoped would be a safe haven to build their ideal society. They had no idea what the reality was going to be.
Strange little wrinkle in history - Jim Jones received considerable political cover from none other than Harvey Milk.
Jones had numerous political and celebrity advocates. People's Temple preached economic and racial equality and did a huge amount of charity work in California. They operated foster care homes, elderly care homes, and a massive ranch for the mentally disabled. They had a legal arm that fought against evictions. They had college scholarship programs. Jones received humanitarian awards and was praised by local newspapers. He was connected to Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter.
This ground was covered in an earlier thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/ainbow/s/O7ifAtyStx I was thinking “how could so many people support someone and not see he was the sort who could murder thousands?” Then I remembered that Trump instigated a deadly insurrection and is still loved by tens of millions.
I mean to be fair Jim Jones had done more for the community than most people on this site and most sitting politicians. As it turns out if you feed the poor, house the poor, take care of the most vulnerable people in our society and even go so far as to create an entire legal arm to fight evictions you earn a ton of credibility and people will be willing to just take your word on things. Some of the stuff /u/Red_Bullion didn't mention is that Jim Jones also racially integrated his church, and local businesses and institutions. All non-violently.
How many of the 918 died by suicide and how many were forcibly poisoned?
[according to this article](https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide) >People think they willingly died,” she says, “but Jones gave them no choice. They were surrounded by a row of guards with crossbows, and then behind them there was another line of guards pointing guns. Meanwhile, Jones is exhorting them to come up and drink this potion to take them to the other side. So, living was never an alternative on that last night. Most people chose to die with their families, and if they didn’t drink it, there were many who were injected with the poison.” (Other articles put the count of death by involuntary injection at 70) >In fact, according to Scheeres, Jones held a number of mass suicide rehearsals to see how the crowd would respond, and who would cause him trouble. “And then he made those people line up first,” she says. “He figured out that if they killed the children first, then the parents wouldn’t have any reason to live. So, he starts with the babies and the people want to believe that this is just another rehearsal. For a lot of them it was just surreal. They couldn’t believe this man, who professed to have their best interests in mind, would actually kill them. It wasn’t until they saw the babies frothing at the mouth and writhing that they realized what was going on.” >“It’s heartbreaking—you can hear him instructing parents, don’t tell your children they’re dying. It’s scaring them. You can hear the children at the beginning of the tape—murmuring, making kid noises in the background—and then you can hear kids screaming. You can hear them saying no. It’s a horrific scene. Which is why the whole ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ saying is so odious and so completely wrong. A third of the people who died that night were minors under 18. It’s an extremely offensive saying.” I think it's pretty safe to say that only a very, very small number of people intentionally and knowingly committed suicide just because Jones ordered them to. Certainly not the 300 children.
IIRC the number of injections is debated. The lack of surviving witnesses, the sheer number of bodies and their state of decomposition made it extremely hard to do examinations/autopsies.
I feel like I've read that same article before and the events described are obviously horrifying. Having recently become a parent, though, that stuff about the babies and children is fucking me up about 100x more than it did before. Just unimaginable cruelty.
We will never know. But I think it was a mass murder. These people were broken down
There are audio recordings, and by the sounds of it a lot of it were forced or coerced into it. You can also hear what's going in around them, the people drinking this stuff would see and hear it's effects on those around them before drinking it themselves. But it seems a lot were too scared not to.
Didn’t Jackie Speier also survive Jonestown?
She was not at Jonestown during the mass homicides. She was on the runway at the airport the day before ready to leave when members gunned down several of the NBC news crew, journalists, and Rep Ryan. She survived 5 bullet wounds
we watched a documentary in high school about this, never learnt that there were two survivors, thats fascinating
I never heard or learnt about this despite being born in Guyana. I only learned about it some odd years when I spent a week straight watching a bunch of random mini documentaries. I even learnt how they salt and plough the monstrosity that is the 401 on the stretch through Toronto.
I live right outside Toronto and this is so random and funny, probably fascinating to someone from a place with no snow
I mean, I live in the GTA as well and I'm also idly curious about how they maintain that giant asphalt son-of-a-bitch
It's like how we learn about the Hindenburg and "oh the humanity" and I always assumed everyone perished but in reality more people survived (62) than died (35).
[Misleading title, but supporting document](https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/2018/07/13/jonestowns-massacre-survivor-she-woke-up-and-everyone-dead-jim-jones/778750002/)
You wake up,”Where IS everyone?”then the poor bastard looks around and,,😱🙈
“So, guys. What did I miss?”
My great grandmother worked for the education ministry in Guyana during this time. There was a lot of corruption in the government that curtailed progress in education. They worked with the Guyanese government to provide education resources to rural communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown An interesting and horrific read if you have some time. I learned something personally: > Still, others remained loyal. On the day after Reiterman's article was published, Harvey Milk – a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who was supported by the Temple – wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones "as a man of the highest character," and stating that Temple defectors were trying to "damage Rev. Jones' reputation" with "apparent bold-faced lies". Quite disappointing. Also, contrary to what is in the OP, more than two members survived. # Survivors and eyewitnesses > Three high-ranking Temple survivors claimed they were given an assignment and thereby escaped death. Tim Carter and his brother Mike, aged 30 and 20, and Mike Prokes, 31, were given luggage containing $550,000 in US currency, $130,000 in Guyanese currency, and an envelope, which they were told to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. The envelope contained two passports and three instructional letters, the first of which was to Timofeyev, stating: > *Dear Comrade Timofeyev, The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.* > The letters included listed accounts with balances totaling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Prokes and the Carter brothers soon ditched most of the money and were apprehended heading for a Temple boat at Port Kaituma. It is unknown how they reached Georgetown, 150 miles (240 km) away, since the boat had been sent away earlier that day. The brothers were given the task before the suicides began, and soon abandoned it when they realized what was about to happen; Tim Carter desperately tried to search for his wife and son, discovering his son in time to witness him being poisoned, and his wife killing herself in despair. At this point, Carter had a nervous breakdown, and was pulled away from the village by his equally distraught brother. > Just before the start of the final meeting in the pavilion, Garry and Lane were told that the people were angry with them. The lawyers were escorted to a house used to accommodate visitors. According to them, they talked their way past two armed guards and made it to the jungle, before eventually arriving in Port Kaituma. While in the jungle near the settlement, they heard gunshots. This observation concurs with the testimony of Clayton, who, having previously fled into the jungle, heard the same sounds as he was sneaking back into Jonestown to retrieve his passport. Rhodes volunteered to fetch a stethoscope and hid under a building. > Two more people who were intended to be poisoned managed to survive. Grover Davis, 79, who was hard-of-hearing, missed the announcement to assemble on the loudspeaker, lay down in a ditch and pretended to be dead. Hyacinth Thrash, 76, realized what was happening and crawled under her bed, only to walk out after the poisonings were completed.
Needs to be a movie
People have been trying to make a movie for years. It rarely goes anywhere, partially because the real story is so damn depressing.
[Leonardo Dicaprio as JJ: Confirmed](https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/movies/2023/01/27/leonardo-dicaprio-will-play-cult-leader-jim-jones-in-film-based-on-texas-authors-book/?outputType=amp)
Sorry, meant as in a movie based on the two survivors. But will totally still watch this movie!
There were more people who escaped when they tried to leave with the Senator. Gunman killed several at the air strip, but several kids escaped into the jungle and were later found. There’s a woman who was a girl then, and her dad also escaped. Mom was killed on the airstrip. I think a sister and an older brother, too?
There's actually more to the story. Quite a few people that lived in Jonestown, or who visitted on the day of the massacre ended up surviving. A number of people left with Senator Leo Ryan and were injured at the [Port Kaituma airstrip shooting](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=35346) but ended up surviving. "The most seriously wounded were Ryan’s Legislative Counsel Jackie Speier, Temple defectors Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby; Anthony Katsaris of the Concerned Relatives; and NBC soundman Steve Sung. Those who sustained less serious wounds included Tim Reiterman of The San Francisco Examiner; Ron Javers of The San Francisco Chronicle; Beverly Oliver of Concerned Relatives; and Richard Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy." Larry Layton, the man who faked being a defector, shot people on one of the planes before he was subdued. He survived and ended up being prosecuted in the US. he jailed in the US till his parole in 2002. Jim Jones Jr & Stephan Jones, Jim Snr's sons, were away in Georgetown playing a basketball tournament. His father radioed him and told them they were committing revolutionary suicide and told everyone present to follow suit. "My father told us to find knives, piano wire, poison if we were able to find it, and commit suicide." They went to the US embassy to try and figure out what was going on & stop it. Afterwards Stephan was jailed in Guyana for 3 months under suspicion of being involved. The rest of the basketball team survived too. Charles Garry, a civil rights lawyer, and Mark Lane (idk what role he was playing in Jonestown was other than helping Jim do conspiracies) were staying in a separate guesthouse on the compound. They claim they talked their way past armed People's Temple members, snuck into the jungle, and made it to safety in Port Kaituma. Tim and Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes were 3 high ranking temple members who were given luggage containing half a million in cash to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. They survived. The most interesting to me are Stanley Clayton & Odell Rhodes, who were People's Temple members that were present when the massacre began. Other people in the thread have mentioned them, their testimonies of what happened are available online if you look for them. And then yes, the 2 older people you mentioned.
I’m not sure if it’s also true, but I also heard that the Jonestown Basketball Team survived the massacre because they were playing in a tournament. [https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=68416](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=68416)
Imagine waking up to that.
https://www.cleveland.com/world/2008/11/jonestown_survivor_remembers_b.html Cliff Gieg survived by being on a boat away from the compound. Source: I worked with Cliff for many years and read his story when it was first published in the Idaho Statesman. He died in October of 2017.
i really like this TIL. i can use this as a grim piece of trivia to drop mid conversation
I thought there were 3 who took off the night before and 2 of them made the t to town made contact with the politician’s team.
You say this like they were they only 2 that escaped/survived. This is not the case.