The Ryan visit has gone badly wrong for Jim Jones, who starts a sequence of events culminating in the largest-ever mass murder-suicide. This is the final day in Jonestown.
In this series, Newsweek reconstructs the events leading to the Jonestown Massacre as it happened in 1978, day by day.On Saturday, Jones gave the residents a rare free day. He wanted the community to appear relaxed. Teens played basketball, a girls' drill team practiced their routines to music, grade-schoolers watched American cartoons in the pavilion.The journalists arrived from their Port Kaituma lodgings mid-morning, angry that the Temple dump truck was two hours late retrieving them.
At 2:30 p.m., the newsmen and fourteen defectors stood in the truck bed, anxious to go. The driver got out to speak with Jones and his security guards and then returned and drove the truck into a deep ditch. As the anxious passengers waited for a bulldozer to pull it out, shouts came from the pavilion. The reporters sprinted over. Congressman Ryan's shirt was bloodied.
They shot out the larger plane's front wheel before training their weapons on the passengers inside."Duck down!" someone yelled, but Patty Parks didn't move fast enough; a bullet caught the back of her head and her brain landed on the seat beside her. Two teenagers jumped up and managed to shut the heavy door but were shot in the legs.
The so-called"Death Tape," as his final speech became known, runs for 44 minutes, and includes more than 30 edits where Jones stopped and started the recording, presumably to censor voices or sounds he didn't want on the tape for posterity. "I feel that as long as there's life, there's hope," Miller said in a clear, strong voice."That's my faith... When we destroy ourselves, we're defeated. We let them, the enemies, defeat us."Miller continued."I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals. I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs."
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