Jonestown

:For other uses, see Jonestown (disambiguation)

Mass suicide

Shortly after the shootings, Jones decided to start the mass suicide, as he knew that the Guyanese Defence Force would be coming for him once they got word of the shootout at the airstrip.  Jones had the mass suicide recorded on a cassette tape in which it would seem there were only a few people who were reluctant to go through with the suicide, but they were convinced otherwise by other members and Jones himself.

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On November 18, 1978 two metal buckets of grape Flavor Aid laced with Valium and cyanide were brought into the assembly hall and the mixture was dispensed in small paper cups.  Babies and children were the first ones to ingest the mixture as it was squirted into their throats with a syringe.  The elderly followed, and then the adults.  Many blindly drank it even after watching their children die.  The rest had the mixture poured down their throats after resisting drinking.

Related Topics:
Flavor Aid - Valium - Cyanide

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Bodies also bore the marks of hypodermic needles with which the poison was injected. Some sources assert there were injections into unwilling victims (http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/relstudies/290/newage/1978.html, http://www.mk-resistance.com/jonestown.html, http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Jonestwn.html, http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/JonestownReport/Volume6/tapeyohnk.htm), although the numbers vary widely.  The precise circumstances are the focus of a number of conspiracy theories (see, for example, http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm).

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Those who tried to hide were tracked down and killed by Jones's armed guards but some survivors did manage to escape into the jungle. Jones's only natural son, Stephan Jones, who happened to be away during the suicide, asserted in an interview that people were probably not coerced but wanted to remain loyal to the group and its ideals and did not want to be seen as traitors.

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Jones himself was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot to his head while sitting in a deckchair.  Some maintain that he may have been killed by an escaping cult member.

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Hours after news of the mass suicide got out, local authorities found 913 of the 1,110 inhabitants dead, including 276 children.  One of the survivors, Laura Johnston Kohl, escaped the mass suicide as she was away from Jonestown at that time.

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Jonestown itself became a "ghost town" after 1978 and was mostly destroyed by a fire in the mid-1980s, after which the ruins were left to decay; as of 2004 there is little to mark the site of one of the most notorious mass suicides in history.

Related Topics:
Ghost town - 1980s - As of 2004

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