Where were you when Jonestown happened?

I was 10 when Jonestown happened. I remember hearing about it, but the memory that had the biggest impact was the Time Magazine cover that showed a picture of all of the bodies - so many that they filled the entire cover. I remember walking past the magazine at our local general store. I just stared because I couldn't comprehend at 10 years old why so many people had to die.

this was the worst thing that could of ever happened to innocent people and children,it must of been terrorizing at the last few minutes.  This Jimmy Jones was CRAZY.He did justice to himself committing suicide. He's in hell now, burning, I hope! And why people have to follow nuts like him on religion,I don't understand. To give up everything they own for that nut.Its just another cult. They're always goofy.

Hi Heather.  Glad to see you have this open communication line.....I hope it can reach all the way up into the hallowed halls of MSNBC executive management.  I publish a blog (actually two in total, but the second one is on current events) exclusively about Jonestown and the People's Temple. 

Take your time reading it (and anyone else out there).....I have been posting for a while now.  Lots of info, but my main goal is to try to get the WHOLE story out about the background of this senseless tragedy.  The Big Media has covered it up, you see, and I'm not speaking out of the standard "conspiracy angle"......no, just that I hope you can forward this message on to any and everybody at MSNBC, so that just maybe, maybe, the accurate account of the People's Temple can finally be told.

     I appreciate your time.  Thanks,

                  Tom Kinsolving

P.S.  My website can be found under the key words "Jonestown Apologists Alert                         

                                                              Thanks.

It is interesting how the term "drink the kool-aid" has become part an parcel of our language but how few know of the origins unless they were alive at the time.  Interestingly, an Air Force helicopter (an MH-53J) that helped to recover many of the bodies from Jonestown was retired from the active inventory just this September.  Photos of it's final flight can be found on flickr by searching on the words pave low jonestown.  I had just started college at the time of the event.  After the shock of it, I recall how quickly the gallows humor followed.  Depravity, perhaps...but certainly a sense of how difficult it was to identify with such a large number of lost souls.

I was a high school senior in New Jersey.  I was editor of my high school newspaper.  My aunt knew Bob Brown's widow thru a mutual friend.  Bob Brown was the NBC News cameraman that was killed at the airport.  My aunt set me up with a telephone interview with Mrs. Brown one Sunday afternoon after Jonestown.  I will never forget her grace and courage in talking to me about the loss of her husband and the unthinkable at Jonestown - a person she didn't even know.  Mrs. Brown did this for me because I was so interested in journalism and politics, which were her husband's passion too.    I have never forgotten what she did for me in her darkest days.

P.S. - I still have the article from my high school newspaper that I wrote after that interview.

The actual number of lost souls was 914 - I remember the number distinctly because it was my car's registration number and I remember the incident for I lived in Guyana at that time.  I knew the Dentist who attended to the children's teeth and I saw many of them arrive one night at Timehri Airport where I was meeting some friends on the same flight and the children looked so beautiful and healthy.  I always felt it could have been prevented if the government at that time had taken steps to do so and I do remember what Bateman did to the young woman in Bel Air Park.

Hello Heather, I didn't realize the 30th anniversary was approaching until I clicked on the MSNBC website.  I was the NBC cameraman who shot those pictures in Jonestown with Fred Francis.  As horrific as those pictures were you have no idea how terrifying it was for myself and the other NBC personnel to cover this story.  What went on behind the scenes to report the story is almost a story in itself.

Bateman was a member of the Jim Jones Cult who was tried for the young woman's brutal murder and sentenced to some years imprisonment.  Jim Jones used to have lovely trawlers which came into Georgetown and purchased merchandise from J.P.Santos & Co., Ltd.  Her murder occurred the same time as the death of the others but her other friend escaped with the help of friends who put her on a flight out of guyana and she was able to give the American Government all the details of what was going on in Guyana at Jones Town.

Your Camerman is quite right and we just dont want to remember the photographs which we saw of the crime scene, the God who I know, "don't like ugly".

I was 10 when Jonestown happened. I lived 30 minutes away for Port Kaituma and can still remember the day it happened. At around 7pm the old train kept coming up to where my family lived in a placed called Annie Creek and would turned back towards Matthews Ridge the City of the North West region of Guyana. A few foot steps were hear outside, but in the jungle no one opens a window or door unless your name is called out.

This happened until the early morning hours of the next day, my uncle tried tuning our little radio to pick up a signal form Georgetown the capital of Guyana but no avail.  My uncle upon hearing the train coming again to our area decide to go down to the train station to find out what was going on, a few minutes later he came back and said that they were soldiers on the train with big guns and the train did not stop. All that day we were still without a radio to tell us what was going on, the other family that lived a few miles from us did not have a radio signal either.

 Finally, we all concluded that maybe Venezuela had invaded the country.  A few days later we saw US planes with men carrying really big guns and planes with guns sticking out the front of them and the planes would fly really low, we were convinced that Venezuela had invaded and the US had come to rescue Guyana.  

We had no clue such a terrible tragedy had occur that close to us. We had no radio, no telephone to call our family in Georgetown to find out what was going on and no newspapers. It was not until one week after when my aunt brother came with copies of all the old newspapers from Georgetown that we found out what happened. By this time a few gold mines had came by let my uncle know that the were finding dead bodies on some of the trails. Its quite possible some of the bodies that were not found are those people that tried to escaped.

Months after the US planes continued to fly over us with body bags instead of guns. I remembered playing with some of the Amerindian kids and a US plane came down really low to the ground. I guess the though that I was a survivor, but we took off running between the trees. The day after the entire Amerindian tribe from the area left, they were never heard from or seen again. Apparently, they were afraid that they were going to be killed.

This is one of worst thing that could of ever happened to innocent people and children in history and I keep hoping it would never happen again, but it continues to because too many people put their faith in Man and not in God.

I remember when Jim Jones lived in Redwood Valley, Calif. His house is still there even today. It had a cage for a bear. Jim Jones was a very scary person and so were his goons.

A good friend of mine lost his mother and a sister in the mass suicide/murder. It seems like yesterday but its been 30 years.

I was 19 years old when my co-worker/friend invited me to go to the temple in San Francisco.  She worked  in the dental clinic, and I worked in medical records. She gave me the telephone hot line to the temple, she was trying to recurit me, I called the telephone number several times, and listened to Jim Jones talk about fearful plans that the US government had for certain cultures in the the US.  It sounded discusting.  Upon listening to these messages I was very scared to attend the temple with my friend, and one day friend told everyone at work that she was going to Africia, she died over there, I remember our place of work had to verify her dental records to identify her.  I remember several people saying " When Jim Jones started asking for their social security checks, it was time to stop going to the temple".  I pray that Dula is RIP. May God continue to Bless all the survivors of this horrible event.

I, too remember this awful day.  Too bad so many people haven't learned from this tragedy.  They're still blindly following self-proclaimed leaders without any substantial proof of who they really are or to where they are truly leading.

I was in college in San Francisco tutoring Algebra for extra credit. I attended the People's Church on Ofarrell and Jones street once and had no idea (and certainly don't care) this thing had an anniversary. Oh well, there but for the grace of bleached blondes with dad's in white collar jobs . . . .

Hope he's burning.

I was seven years old when the tragedy happened i am from guyana matthews ridge north west. my mom saw a lot of the dead people , also she and her friends help a few people escape. I saw jim jones once or twice i think he wore a big ring on his pinky finger. My mom pass away 8 years ago but if she was alive she could have told  you the whole  story from top to bottom. the bodies smell really bad me and my brother felt sorry for the families there was so much money that was stolen form families lying around, there was a big washing tubs  that was used to mix the kool aid also buckets . jim jone is rotting in hell right now for all the wrong he did to those people.

YES, THE MEDIA DID TELL US THAT SEVERAL MEN HAD FLED INTO THE JUNGLE but the one person who escaped the suicide was the lady in the sick bay who they completelely forgot about and this was told to us by our local newspaper.  She apparently had kidney problems and had been placed unto the machine.  When JIM JONES  first arrived in Georgetown, he went to one of our catholic churches but neveer mixed with the local community.  At no time did we ever hear him speak against his fellow Americans so it was difficult to actually grasp what really was his mission in coming to Guyana.  We didn't even know that he had a son and it was alarming to learn next morning from a phone call from Miami that a Congressman from America had been shot in Guyana and we who lived in Georgetown was unaware of what was going on.  Fear broke out in the city that same day and we were all afraid to leave our homes.

What I remember from that day is that I was away at college and a brand new Christian.  I attended a church called the People's Church which was in NO WAY affilitated or even remotely close to Jim Jones' The Peoples Church.  My parents, who were upset I had become "religious," were very angry that I attended the People's Church because they thought it was a part of Jim Jones' church.  I remember my parents really telling me off about being in a cult,  how I was being brainwashed by this cult, and how they were going to hire someone to get me out of there.  It was only later on that they learned the church I attended was a Bible believing and Bible teaching church.  Then they stopped bothering me about it.  Overall, it was a terrible event for those involved in Jonestown. Those poor innocent children who fully trusted their parents and innocently drank the kool-aid.  The parents totally violated their children's trust.  I will never forget that.

In July of '78, my wife & I had come from Seattle on vacay & to see Jerry Garcia at Theater 1839, at 1839 Geary Street. We waited for a few hours for the doors to open and we noticed a church next door, with some pretty scowly guys glaring at us Deadheads. At intermission, it was announced that some church, whose name I didn't notice, would be providing refreshments/dinner, & we were served a spaghetti dinner by some very nice church type ladies. A few months later I was watching the news at home near Seattle, when suddenly the views of Geary Street I'd seen while waiting for the doors to open that evening flashed on the screen. I called to my wife, and we were transfixed as the horror of what had gone down in Guyana was reported, and as we realized that those very pleasant church ladies, and those scowling men, and the children the ladies had been shushing were probably among the dead. At the time, I  subscribed to New West Magazine, and as each issue arrived, I read more about this terrible event than I ever needed to know, and when Armistead Maupin's "Further Tales Of The City" was released, I could feel my shared pain return. It was a forgettable performance by Jerry & the band, but I'll always remember those nice people from some church I never knew the name of.

How could one simple minded person brainwash so many people into performing a mass suicide? The biggest most over powering thought that went through my mind then still goes through it today, 30 years later, the grounds of the mass burial must be so fertile and rich that you can probably grow 20lb tomatoes and huge heads of lettuce!

Hey - all they knew was Mr. Jones's way.  Yes they could!  They wanted "change".

The CIA were involved in Jones Town and killing President John F. Kennedy and bringing drugs into America. Google the CIA's dirty deeds.

I absolutely agree with change, but a mass suicide? I would try a different approach. Yes We Can! And we did! By voting, not drinking poison laced kool-aid.

Hi, I am  37 and that means I was 7 years old when this happened. I remember when this story broke. I am from Guyana and the aguyanes people were in shocked. No one knew that these people were living in Guyana. I remember the neighbours and my Mom and grandmother discussing it. Everyone was in shocked. I still remember people trying to make sense of it. What a horrible way to die. Inocent people and children. I cant believe that the then government let this happened.. As I grew and travelled and when asked where I was from and told people "Guyana" , they would always commented about the JonesTown story. I think that was how my beautiful country became known to the world. Its very sad to be remembered that way.