"I just felt like this was all they had," he says. I think that we all know that in his final days he was certainly a villain, but there are people who just reach out to me because theyve come upon something Ive written and theyre able, through me, to see the humanity of it all. He went through years of nightmares, mourning and shame. ". By the time Stephan Jones was 16, his father had moved the family to the big temple building in a black neighborhood of San Francisco, where politicians and black leaders had begun paying considerable attention to Jim Jones' racially mixed congregation and fervently preached exhortations to adjust society under a socialist god. Harris, a Los Angeles-based NBC investigative reporter who covered the fall of Saigon and the Nicaragua rebellion, had been killed. The bodies of followers that drank the poison are strewn around the commune, The Peoples Temple compound, led by Jim Jones, is shown above in November 1978 after the dead bodies were removed. But the reality is that it was far from a mass suicide. Jim Jones himself did not drink the poison. Neither were the White Nights where everyone stayed up, armed with machetes to fight enemies who never arrived. And I dont know that he could actually have done that. When Smith reunited with his mother and wife in Jonestown, Ollie was 8 months pregnant. When he was ordered to Georgetown to help with supply shipments, Smith said he concocted an escape plan: Ollie and other temple singers and dancers, he believed, would soon be sent to Georgetown to perform, and the family would flee to the U.S. Embassy. Being in Jonestown before Jim got there was the best thing in my life.. Stephan Jones, Jim Jones's sole surviving child, was born in Indiana, United States, on June 1, 1959. The temple really became my family, she said. There are moments when he glimpses the edges of power and understands precisely how it might be used. The only sounds they heard came from the jungle animals going about their business. Like everyone else, he died there, his son said. 'Everyone participated in it and because of that, it went as far as it did,' she said. "I don't know what was happening . I would argue that even a lot of the good works that he wanted to do early on were an attempt to impress my mother and her family'. Swollen to bursting, that was the corpse of Jim Jones, the man who had conducted this concert of death. When I left at 21, I left a part of myself there, she said. He's 61 now. The temple was the only life he knew but says he always had his doubts. Were you aware that you had a very different childhood than most? My companion, Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, would be murdered in an ambush. Stephan Gandhi Jones was 19. Stephan is the only living son of Jim Jones and his late wife. The years are slowly weaning Stephan Jones from Jonestown; he reads, goes to movies, wants now to have a child of his own. There was something there. And when her 23-year-old sister joined, Jordan went to live with her at age 12. It was just more controlled. Did You Know Soccer Player Crystal Dunns Husband Pierre Soubrier Is A Football Specialist? The media has done a poor job; theyve demonized him. "I don't care what you think of my father," Jones wrote in 2015. Stephan Gandhi Jones is the son of Jim Jones, the controversial religious cult leader. This past year, she returned to long-overgrown Jonestown. The church provided free drug rehabilitation, medical care, food. Siblings by adoption include Agnes Paulette Jones (1943-1978); Stephan Gandhi Jones(Born 1959); Jimmy Jones, Jr. aka James Warren Jones, Jr.(born 1960); and Timothy Tupper aka Timothy Glenn Tupper Jones, Tim "Day" Jones (1959-1978). 'To me the ends justified the means,' he said. It's like my hurt for them, or my missing them, is the only thing I have left of them." There, as part of Jones' personal security detail, Cobb saw the once captivating minister strung out on drugs. I'll kill you! And he faked getting shot in Redwood Valley [California] when I was still pretty young, and we felt like we were in danger much of the time. Jim Jones had adopted other children, gathering around him what he liked to call his "rainbow family"--Stephan's brothers and sisters were black and Korean--but Stephan remembers days spent mostly by himself: there was a cleared-out place in the underbrush where he could crouch and become Hercules, or a soldier of war. That he was just this crazy zealot this entire time. "I mellowed out." Stephan Jones was born on 1 June 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. During that period, more than 900 people died including Stephans mom and some of his siblings. He said he considered it a failing on his part when he did. He says his daughters have seen him gnash his teeth when he talks. In code, his father told him everyone was going to die in 'revolutionary suicide. 'Hit the deck!' In minutes, the back of the truck was piled high with crates, suitcases, backpacks and people. They are amused; they embrace him. ", Jim Jones had warned them over and over that invading soldiers would torture their children; maybe that is what they feared most, Stephan Jones says. How do you explain the renewed interest in the Peoples Temple? Forty years ago this week, a California congressman and a group of journalists traveled to Guyana, South America, to see Jonestown, a remote settlement created by an American church, and investigate reports of abuses of members. Stephan believed he was too cowardly to follow through with the oft-threatened 'revolutionary suicide.'. "They just needed this messiah, this purpose. "I don't know. I know Ive reached a better place and I dont fear lapsing back into the darkest times, but its a daily process and one that Im grateful to have.. He says that to understand how a thing like that can happen, you have to do what leaders like Jim Jones and his successors dont want us to do to read. . Some of them had started out with him in the earliest days in Indiana and moved with him to California. 'I just have to love him and forgive him.'. Eugene Smith recalls how his mother, a churchgoing African-American, bought into Jim Jones dream after they attended a service in Fresno. We couldn't know then that the grim little world of this sick man would shatter within hours, taking hundreds of his followers to their deaths. 'We think he's got a gun. Instead of finishing high school, Vilchez moved to San Francisco, where she lived in the church. He remarried three decades ago, and he and his wife Erin raised three sons. Stephan may be reached at moreheart1@comcast.net. Some of those leaving the temple eyed the vehicles with suspicion. Partner of Terry Carter Jones, aka Mary Theresa Carter, Mary Theresa Jones, Terry Carter Jones (died November 18 . "But there's a sadness . . The people are elderly and he knows he must stop it, but he cannot make contact with them; they look at him as though from great distances. The guy you see in all the images. someone shouted, and the driver attempted to turn the truck around. When John Cobb was born in 1960 in a black section of Indianapolis, his mother and older siblings already were temple members. Stephan Jones is a Jonestown survivor. Its not that I had better sight than others; I had a better view of it and it really broke for me when he was unfaithful to my mother and told her about it in detail.. "I just say something like, 'You remember Jonestown?' . Jones had suffered a setback. Devotion to its ideals bolstered her self-worth. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Stephan Gandhi Jonesis the son of the notorious religious cult leaderJim Jones. She gave her house to the Peoples Temple and they moved to San Francisco, where Eugene ran a temple construction crew. Toward the end, as he watched the array of barbiturates, amphetamines and tranquilizers that now slurred his father's speech and sometimes left him physically unable to leave the Jonestown house, Stephan Jones says murder seemed almost redundant. They divorced when Jordan was 6. He was in Georgetown, Guyana on November 18, 1978 with the Jonestown Basketball Team. The shooting triggered the mass murders and suicides in Jonestown of more than 900 people orchestrated by the Rev. She died in a tragic car accident only weeks before her mother, Marceline Mae Baldwin Jones, gave birth to her brother, Stephan Gandhi Jones. "He used to say that I would acquire his gift in my late years. "I'd go back in a minute. tap here to see other videos from our team. "The minute I stepped out on the street, I felt so uncomfortable," he says. "It's not--such a bad experience," he says. Number one: People cant understand what was attractive about Dad. For the young Caucasian, there was more: "The white man was so preached against by my father as a way of winning black people, and here I am a white man, feeling like everybody resents me and I have something to apologize for," he says. A second plane, a Guyana Airways 24-seater, was coming in for a landing. Former Peoples Temple member Jim Jones Jr. carries a bucket of bleached rocks to place around the edges of the Jonestown victim memorial in the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, Jim Jones Jr. was adopted by the Joneses in Indiana in 1960. Listen, not long before, we went to play basketball. I mean, here are hundreds and hundreds of people who feel differently than I do--who's right?". If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911, or call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255. stephan gandhi jonesNitro Acoustic. Rebelling, they refused Jones order to come back. Though he waved and smiled at Peoples Temple services, seemingly enraptured like the rest, Stephan Gandhi Jones says he always had his doubts. Four granite slabs are etched with names of the 918 people who died in Guyana- including James Warren Jones, which deeply offends some whose relatives perished. He says his daughters have seen him gnash his teeth when he talks about his father, but they also have heard him speak lovingly of the man who taught him compassion and other virtues. Stephan Jones is a Jonestown survivor. So much was attractive and unique that we turned a blind eye on what was wrong, he said, including his fathers sexual excesses, drug abuse and rants. Copy. . 'He started firing at the front and missed the pilot,' said Dale Parks, who left the temple Saturday. that one last act would be admitting he was a coward, and about nothing. placement: 'Right Rail Thumbnails', In the aftermath, he built a new life. 2007. Gruelling field work was not to her liking. Some scowling faces appeared in the windows that rainy afternoon, watching the defectors leave, some with trunks and others with little more than the clothes on their backs. Jim Jones. That's what triggered it.'. Then he waits a while, until they have come to know him--the very tall young man with the kind voice and the black mustache. When more than 900 people were killed at Jonestown by consuming punch laced with cyanide on Nov. 18, 1978, Stephan was not at the settlement founded by his father. Ollie worked in the nursery, and Eugene felled trees. He's never remarried, and Martin Luther Smith was his only child. He was the son of Jim Jones, who established Jonestown. In this Nov. 13, 2008 file photo, Stephan Jones, son of Rev. At first it was spanking of children. NBC sound man Steve Sung had chunks of one arm blown away. It was easy to see and feel what was attractive about my father. His biggest regrets revolve around the teams refusal to return to Jonestown. Fear of an external threat was a major component of your fathers philosophy. Yes. He went over the seats in a somersault and I flipped out of the plane with him. But Stephan was the biological son of Jim and Marceline Jones. It was he who dreamed up Jonestown, he who willed it into being, and he who brought it down: first, with the assassination of U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan and four others by temple members on a nearby airstrip on Nov. 18, 1978, then with the mass murders and suicides of hundreds, a horror that remains nearly unimaginable 40 years later. And she could only sense the site of the pavilion, the once-vibrant center of Jonestown life where so many died - including her two sisters and two nephews. File photo: Bodies of Peoples Temple mass suicide victims led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, November 1978. She gives us the order that we were supposed to kill ourselves, Vilchez recalled. After more than 22 years at California's transportation department, Smith retired in 2015. They divorced when Jordan was six. 'Baby killer. (Actually, the deadly beverage that day might have been based on a cheaper imitation, Flavor Aid. Four granite slabs are etched with names of the 918 people who died in Guyana including James Warren Jones, which deeply offends some whose relatives perished. Reviews. the whole thing he drove into people's minds for so long--I certainly don't mean to say that what happened was a sane act or that it was a good act, but--", Jones hesitates. He contacted the people at the San Francisco branch of the Peoples Temple and instructed them not to take action. "I say, 'Mom,' " Stephan Jones says, recalling a desperate mother-son huddle toward the end, " 'We're talking about a man who think's he's God. By 1978, the White Nights included a rehearsal for suicide, something Jim Jones previously had tried only with his small circle of confidants within the church. But he said his discontent festered. A bit later the number was revised upward to 408. "I think he would be admitting in his own warped mind that he was not this great revolutionary he had tried to build himself up to be . In this Nov. 13, 2008 file photo, Stephan Jones, son of Rev. And the temple was his life first in Indiana, later in California. PORT KAITUMA, Guyana - 'I feel sorry that we are being destroyed from within,' the Rev. But some lived. Jim Jones had said as a tropical storm rained on the Peoples Temple pavilion. "I always explain to them that it's not what people think--it wasn't a bunch of starry-eyed people in line waiting to take the potion . He has learned, he says, to understand his own resources and the depths of his emotions. Meanwhile, the tractor, with several men in the trailer, rolled toward the terminal shack and halted a short distance away. I want out of this.' Five were dead, five seriously wounded, five suffered relatively minor wounds, nine were unhurt, and six were believed lost or hiding in the dense underbrush along the Kaituma River. Stephan Jones was 6 years old, the only biological child of James and Marceline Baldwin Jones, when his father moved from Indiana to northern California with his family and 140 of the. "I don't even know who my loved ones were with when they died," he says softly. This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Guyanese civilians set up a guard station for us, standing watch all night armed with only a shotgun, a machete and a long-bladed knife. 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People do things for him. Of course, even if he wanted to forget Jonestown, his name was an ever-present reminder. But in 1973, John's oldest brother and a sister, along with six other California college students, quit the church and became its enemies. Stephanie was born in 1954 and died at a very early age of five in a car accident in May 1959. Ryan clearly was in good spirits. I mean, I saw things and was privy to things . And now some wanted to depart. Stephan Jones was born on June 1, 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA as Stephan Gandhi Jones. Speier's right leg had a gaping wound, and her arm was injured. I thought there were reasons for people to want to get us. Rep. Leo Ryan, D-San Mateo, had come to the temple's agricultural project to determine whether the followers of Jones were free to leave the jungle settlement. He loves basketball; he is agile and strong and was tall even before he reached high school. "There was always that guilt fed to you by my father that kept you in check, kept you thinking, 'Maybe I'm wrong'--the guilt for being selfish and questioning this.". I wondered why it happened. He rode bulldozers, dodged falling trees, killed snakes, lit brush fires and rode the slow boats upriver with loads of cut wood for flooring and walls. Is Kristie Mewis Dating the Aussie Star Sam Kerr? In addition to writing the articles below, Stephan appeared as a speaker during the Griot Institute of African Studies lecture series entitled Jonestown: 35 Years Later at Bucknell University; his presentation appears on this page (scroll down the videos). Little Jimmy became part of their Rainbow Family of white, black, Korean-American and Native American children. One day, when she was in high school, she came home and told her parents that her religion class had discussed Peoples Temple; only then did her father share the story of how his family was nearly wiped out. He imagines the guards with guns, and the sky clouding over, and the air suddenly wild with fear, and the sight of the children. You describe yourself in your writings as a rebellious kid. I could still hear the groaning and crying of the targets. They were forced. American soldiers who arrived discovered that beneath the layer of bodies was another layer, and yet another. ), 'It was necessary in my own healing for me to find acceptance for him, understanding of him. 1978. Jones himself, after some artfully applied pressure to the mayor's office, was appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, where once-tedious meetings about public housing suddenly erupted into vigorous cheering sessions, with temple members applauding the pronouncements of Commissioner Jones. Instead, The Washington Post reported that Stephan escaped death with the Jonestown basketball team. The 21-year-old Indiana native felt pride pioneering in the distant jungle of Guyana, South America. "I got sick of the same speeches, the insisting people stay awake, the constantly testing people." The only surviving child of Jim Jones,Stephan was born on June 1, 1959, in Indiana, USA. STEPHAN Gandhi Jones is - in the eyes of the world - the son of a mass murderer. In Biographical Summaries of Notable People . A woman named Sharon Amos had slaughtered her three children and committed suicide. He asked me to make one last mission with him to Jonestown. This return to the cult of Jim Jones is part of a re-examination of dangerous cults and movements in Americas past, like the Osho cult, which had a similar murderous potential. He saw that the jungle would make him a man. He fired at me, but it misfired. Though he waved and smiled at Peoples Temple services, seemingly enraptured like the rest, Stephan Gandhi Jones says he always had his doubts. Dozens of members in Guyana slipped out of Jonestown or happened to be away that day. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. I stopped and listened. 'Naaah.' Dozens of Peoples Temple members in Guyana survived the mass suicides and murders of more than 900 because they had slipped out of Jonestown or happened to be away Nov. 18, 1978. Ollie worked in the nursery, and Eugene felled trees. I got the gun. 'He made a promise - once we get to Jonestown there is no corporal punishment,' Smith said. It was he who dreamed up Jonestown, he who willed it into being, and he who brought it down: First, with the assassination of U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan and four others by temple members on a nearby airstrip on November 18, 1978, then with the mass murders and suicides of hundreds, a horror that remains nearly unimaginable 40 years later. He's too close to Jim Jones to leave.'. We used curtains for bandages. 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So yes, many people were disenchanted., Im sure he feared it and Im sure he had people telling him it existed. Vilchez returned to Jonestown for the first time in 40 years. And based on what Stephan Jones is doing now, it seems he has tried to live his life as normally as anyone who has gone through what he has possibly could. There had been underground boxes to punish the lazy; public beatings; drills where guns and bows and arrows were hauled out on call of 'white knight,' and plans for mass suicides. As the visitors prepared to return to the U.S., Peoples Temple gunmen ambushed them on a remote jungle airstrip killing the congressman, Leo Ryan; three newsmen; and a church defector. "I mellowed out. And it was necessary in my own healing for me to find acceptance for him, understanding of him. File photo: Stephan Jones, son of Rev. They were under siege, Jim Jones would cry; the snipers were after him; the Guyanese army was about to descend; the children would be taken away and probably tortured. Id rather just talk about what didnt work and hope that people can see that in their own lives. 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More than a few bottles of rum were consumed or poured on wounds. He plays forward. The picture, he recalls, was about hit men. 'I'm real happy to be getting out,' Layton volunteered, then lapsed into a stare. People ask, How can you ever be proud of your father? he said. He lives just outside San Francisco and works as an office systems installer, arranging furniture and office interiors. Jim Jones (1931-1978) and Marceline Jones (1927-1978). He cries out, "My God, you're not dead!" After the massacre, Layton strolled back to the area. Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, poses for a portrait near San Rafael, Calif. The slaughter at Jonestown was the worst civilian tragedy in U.S. history before September 11, 2001. More than 900 people lived in the agricultural mission, with its dining pavilion, tidy cottages, school, medical facilities and rows of crops. 1959. I see it in politics, I see it in advertising, I see it in a variety of places, and I feel theres no more pernicious or toxic belief than that. mode: 'thumbnails-rr', Relatives & Associates. He was so wasted most of the time. "This is really crazy," he recalls thinking. The expression was born of the perception that Jim Jones disciples were gullible people who gladly drank the poison because their leader told them it would do them good. Save record . The dreams have never left him. The minister was famous for his faith healings, which expelled bloody growths from the bodies of the ailing; it was not for many years that Stephan Jones learned about the sleight of hand with raw chicken giblets. In Indianapolis, he served as a student pastor in the Methodist Church in 1952 but. Sadly we were finally at a point where I felt I had enough support and we decided that we were going to take action'. But we never felt he would go through with it because we saw him as such a coward.. 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