Editor’s Note: The tragedy of Jonestown — the secluded commune in Guyana where over 900 members of the Peoples Temple died in a mass murder-suicide on November 18, 1978 — is still one of history’s most frightening cult catastrophes. This story was first published by PEOPLE in 2018, and it is now being revisited to look at one young survivor’s frantic escape from a horror that few have lived to tell.
Decades have passed since Tracy Parks crouched on the rain-soaked, muddy runway in Guyana, cradling her mother’s lifeless body in her hands and shaking her desperately to shake her up.
But for Parks, it feels like it was only yesterday.
The barrage of gunfire had subsided, but all around her were bullet-riddled bodies, some dead, others bleeding and wailing. “Get in the jungle,” her father Jerry said. “Run.”
Tracy, aged 12, looked up and saw her elder sister Brenda rushing across the airport runway toward the dark wall of woods. Before she knew it, she was jogging right behind her, rushing through the dark rainforest.
“I felt like I wasn’t in my body,” Tracy explained in a 2018 edition of People Magazine Investigates: Cults, which aired on Investigation Discovery. “We were so scared, we just kept running.”
Three days later, the fever-ridden, practically unconscious girls walked out of the bush, fully aware of the awful horror they’d avoided. More than 900 members of the Peoples Temple religious sect, from which she and her family were attempting to flee when ambushed, committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced grape punch. 304 children died as a result of their parents forcing cyanide-filled syringes into their mouths when they were too young to drink from cups.
Their bodies, along with those of the cult’s leader, Jim Jones, are now rotting seven miles away in the searing tropical heat of the group’s compound, Jonestown.
“My brother broke the news to me little by little as the doctors were nursing me back,” Parks, who lost five family members in the shooting, told PEOPLE. “‘No one is living,’ he informed me. “They are all gone.”
Parks, one of the youngest Peoples Temple members to survive the worst mass murder-suicide in recent history, continues to grapple with the trauma decades later.
“This wasn’t suicide,” argues Parks, 51, who now owns a day care in California. “It was murder. “Those children, like many of the adults, did not want to die.”
