Editor’s note: The tragedy of Jonestown, a remote commune in Guyana where more than 900 Peoples Temple members died in a mass murder-suicide on November 18, 1978, remains one of the most chilling cult-related events in history. PEOPLE first published this story in 2018, but now we’re revisiting it to explore one young survivor’s desperate escape from a nightmare in which few survive.
It’s been decades since that afternoon when Tracy Parks knelt on a rain-soaked, muddy airstrip in Guyana, cradled her mother’s lifeless body in her hands and shook her desperately trying to wake her.
But for Parks, it feels like just yesterday.
The explosions of gunfire had stopped, but all around her lay bodies riddled with bullets, some dead, some bleeding and groaning. “Go into the jungle,” yelled his father, Jerry. “run.”
Tracy, then 12, looked up and saw her older sister Brenda sprinting down the airport runway toward a wall of black trees. Before I knew it, she was running right behind me, heading into the dense rainforest.
“I felt like my body didn’t exist,” Tracy recalled in a 2018 episode of People magazine’s “Investigates: Cults” about Investigation Discovery. “We were so scared that we just kept running.”
Three days later, after the girls stumbled out of the jungle, feverish and unconscious, they became fully aware of the unimaginable horrors they had escaped. More than 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult, the group from which she and her family were ambushed and trying to escape, committed a mass murder-suicide by drinking grape punch laced with cyanide. The dead included 304 children whose parents forced cyanide-filled syringes into the mouths of children too young to drink from cups.
Their bodies, along with that of cult leader Jim Jones, now lie decomposing on the group’s property known as Jonestown, 11 miles away in the scorching heat of the equator.
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Parks, who lost five family members in the massacre, told PEOPLE, “Little by little, while the doctors were caring for me, my brother broke the news to me.” “He told me, ‘No one is alive. They’re all gone.'”
Decades after the tragedy, Parks, one of the youngest Temple members to survive the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history, still struggles to cope with the trauma.
“This was not a suicide,” insists Parks, 51, now the owner of a day care in California. “This is murder. Those children didn’t want to die, and many of the adults didn’t want to die either.”
