Editor’s Note: The tragedy of Jonestown — the remote commune in Guyana where more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple died in a mass murder-suicide on Nov. 18, 1978 — remains one of history’s most chilling cult-related events. This story, first published in 2018, revisits one young survivor’s desperate escape from a nightmare that few lived to tell.
Decades have passed since the afternoon Tracy Parks knelt on a rain-soaked, muddy airstrip in Guyana, cradling her mother’s lifeless body and shaking her, begging her to wake up.
For Parks, it still feels as vivid as if it happened yesterday.
The burst of gunfire had finally stopped, but the ground around her was littered with bodies — some already dead, others bleeding and crying out in pain. “Get in the jungle,” her father Jerry yelled. “Run.”
Twelve-year-old Tracy looked up and saw her older sister, Brenda, sprinting across the runway toward the dark wall of trees. Instinct took over. Tracy bolted after her, racing toward the dense rainforest.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(665x0:667x2):format(webp)/survivor-1-7918643f041543e184e01391e818a1dd.jpg)
“I felt like I wasn’t in my body,” Tracy later recalled in a 2018 episode of People Magazine Investigates: Cults on Investigation Discovery. “We were so scared, we just kept running.”
After days of stumbling through the sweltering jungle, feverish and barely conscious, the sisters finally emerged — and only then began to understand the scale of the horror they had escaped. More than 900 members of the Peoples Temple religious sect — the group their family had been trying to flee when they were ambushed — had died in a mass murder-suicide after drinking cyanide-laced grape punch. Among the dead were 304 children, many of whom had cyanide injected into their mouths with syringes because they were too young to drink from cups themselves.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(999x0:1001x2):format(webp)/622282_preview_maxwidth_2000_maxheight_2000_ppi_300_quality_100_embedmetadata_true_embedcolorprofile_true-12b29ed3bf4244fda3cf2b77c837064e.jpg)
Their bodies, along with that of the group’s leader, Jim Jones, lay decomposing seven miles away in the brutal equatorial heat at the compound known as Jonestown.
As Tracy recovered, her brother gently told her what had happened while doctors worked to stabilize her. Parks, who lost five family members in the massacre, remembers him breaking the news “little by little” until he finally said, “No one is alive. They’re all gone.”
Even so many years later, Parks — one of the youngest Peoples Temple members to survive what remains the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history — still wrestles with the trauma of that day.
“This wasn’t suicide,” insists Parks, now 51 and running a day care in California. “This was murder. Those children didn’t want to die, and neither did many of the adults.”Thinking
