Why did jonestown massacre happen

Charles Krause, a Washington Post reporter on the trip, would recall: "Contrary to what the 'Concerned Relatives' had told us, nobody seemed to be starving The group stayed outside of the compound overnight and returned the next day. During their time there, the group were approached by at least a dozen followers asking to return to the US with them.

As the delegation waited for their returning flight, a cohort of Temple gunmen ambushed the group and opened fire, killing five people including Congressman Ryan. Back at the compound, Jones simultaneously urged his more than followers to take their own lives, warning that the Guyanese military would invade and take their children because of the airstrip shooting. Vats of fruit punch laced with cyanide were mixed and distributed around, as in the rehearsals. They had put it all in the church.

They had no recourse. Back at the Guyana headquarters miles km away, members were alerted to the order. Everybody else needs to commit revolutionary suicide right now. We are all doing it right now. Laura says two of Jones' children, who were visiting the capital as part of the Temple's basketball team, refused to follow instructions and told other branches to disregard them. She had been out of the building when the message arrived, and returned to find Guyanese national defence forces bringing out the body-bags for the secretary and her children.

Laura says back at the headquarters, they began to hear reports about the death toll at Jonestown: first saying dead, then We were crying, like I still cry now. I was a mess.

Many of us were inconsolable," she says. Every possible thing that could be botched, was botched. There is no real way to know exactly who died how.

It was just horrific. The final death toll, including the airstrip killings and Jones himself, totalled people. Krause, who survived the ambush and was the first journalist allowed on the scene of the massacre, said that even dogs and the Jonestown pet chimpanzee died alongside the residents.

There were to be no survivors," he wrote in the Washington Post shortly after. Before the events of 11 September , Jonestown was the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history. Laura returned to the US at the end of November and moved back into the People's Temple community in California - a decision that she says she had no qualms about.

I had lived with them for eight years, I knew them so intimately," she says. Jim Jones was the only one who was invested in the deaths. And it made sense to go through the healing together. They couldn't grasp the loss. After a year back at the People's Temple, Laura joined another community where she met her husband and lived for a decade where they had a son together.

I went back to school, and I started teaching in ," Laura says. Having avoided talking about the traumatic experience for almost two decades, Laura eventually met up with Temple survivors for the first time in The trauma of working out the minority who had lived became traumatising and overwhelming, so on meet-ups she found herself surprised to encounter people she did not know had made it out.

The anniversary - 18 November - has become a day for her and others to honour the more than lives that were lost. I am who I am because I survived People's Temple. He realizes the house of cards is starting to crumble.

Scheeres says she felt a deep connection to Tommy Bogue, a survivor she interviewed for her book, who was a teenager at the time and was shot when he, along with his parents and a sister, defected with Ryan. A sister who decided to stay behind died in Jonestown. He tried to run away a year before the mass murder with his best friend.

They stole some food from the kitchen and had a half-baked plan to go to Venezuela. Scheeres says there was simply no way out that last night, when Jones commanded his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch. 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.

Prior to November 18, there had been attempts to leave, Scheeres says. A pile of paper cups with cyanide-laced fruit punch, and a pile of hypodermic syringes, found at Jonestown by Guyanese officials. 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.

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. He told the newspaper some drank the poisonous potion willingly, while it was forced upon others. It was amazing to be walking into a place and have African-Americans really warmly welcoming you and talking to you, and sharing stories with you. It was sweet.

Looking to expand the reach of his organization, Jones frequently met with Father Divine , a popular, if controversial, black evangelist and founder of the Peace Mission movement. Born sometime in the early s, Father Divine started a religious movement in the s that drew huge numbers of worshippers who saw him as God.

As described in Raven , a judge suddenly died shortly after handing down the preacher a prison sentence for being a public nuisance. Father Divine, who lived in an estate in Pennsylvania with his wife Mother Divine, possessed the qualities that Jones mirrored for himself and the Peoples Temple: He had a multiracial congregation, believed in racial equality and preached the abstention of sex.

In December , he was arrested for lewd conduct at a Los Angeles movie theater. And during his final months in Jonestown, Jones was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs. A married man who adopted children of different racial backgrounds, Jones also engaged in sexual relations with some of his female and male followers. He was the only heterosexual on the planet, and that the women were all lesbians; the guys were all gay.

And so anyone who showed in interest in sex was just compensating. Tim Carter, another ex-member, says that Jones hated romantic relationships within the Peoples Temple because they were seen as a threat to the cause and that the members should be focused on their work.

In his Indiana days, Jones once sold pet monkeys door to door. Muggs became sort of a mascot for the Temple under the care of Joyce Touchette, whose family were devoted members to the Temple. Together she and Tim, who left the church a year later, sought to get John back through the U.

By that time, John was already in Guyana, and Jones adamantly refused to hand him over, despite court orders that he must do so. In the end, John Victor Stoen was among approximately people aged 17 years or younger found dead in Jonestown. A Democrat, Ryan was an unconventional politician: He once had himself briefly incarcerated at Folsom State Prison to see what the prison conditions were like, and he went to Canada to investigate the hunting of baby seals.

He wrote a letter to Jim Jones requesting an invitation to visit the settlement, a move that Jones and his followers vehemently opposed but to which they later acquiesced. Ryan traveled to Jonestown accompanied by several journalists and relatives of Temple members. Afterwards when Ryan, the defectors, and the journalists were waiting at the Port Kaituma airstrip for planes to take them home, a truck arrived carrying Temple gunmen who then opened fire.

When the shooting stopped, the congressman and four people were killed, while several others were injured.

In his memory, Ryan received a Congressional Gold Medal in , and a post office in his old district of San Mateo , California was named after him in After the attack on Congressman Ryan and his party at the Port Kaituma airstrip, Jones urged his more than followers in Jonestown that they had to commit suicide or else the Guyanese military will come in and take their children away. Amid the hundreds and hundreds of deaths, there were a number of survivors in Jonestown On the morning of November 18, , hours before the dramatic events unfolded, a group of 11 Temple members — including a mother and her three-year-old son — walked 35 miles to escape under the pretense of going on a picnic.

Two men, Stanley Clayton and Odell Rhodes, were able to bypass armed security through a combination of luck and deception. One of the most remarkable stories of survival from Jonestown belongs to Hyacinth Thrash, an elderly African-American woman who slept inside her cabin throughout the whole ordeal. He let us down.