CRIME
A
SURVIVOR’S
STORY
Jonestown survivor Tracy Parks
(inset, today and at age 12)
recalls the horror she felt
when she learned of the mass
suicide in which Jim Jones
(inset left) and 909 of his
followers died on Nov. 18,- “I knew Jim Jones
wanted us dead,” she says.
racy Parks knelt on the rain-soaked,
muddy airstrip, cradling her mother’s
lifeless body, shaking her, trying to
wake her up. The explosion of gunfire
had stopped, but all around her the
12-year-old saw bodies—some dead,
others bleeding and moaning. “Get
in the jungle,” her father, Jerry,
screamed. “Run. I’ll take care of your mother.”
Tracy looked up to see her older sister Brenda, 18,
sprinting across the runway towards the dark wall
of trees. Before the younger girl knew it, she was
right behind Brenda, racing towards the dense
Guyana rainforest. “I was panicking; I wasn’t
thinking. I felt like I wasn’t in my body,” remembers
Tracy. “We were so scared we just kept running.”
When the fever-ridden, nearly unconscious
sisters staggered out of the jungle three days later,
it was into a world of almost unimaginable horror.
More than 900 members of the Peoples Temple
religious sect—the group that she and her family
had been attempting to flee when they were
ambushed—had committed mass suicideTAs a child 40 years ago,
Tracy Parks fled the
Peoples Temple compound
just hours before Jim
Jones led the largest mass
suicide in history. Now,
she’s sharing her story
Who l 35