US CONGRESSWOMAN RECALLS BEING SHOT BY FOLLOWERS OF CULT LEADER IN THE 1978 JONESTOWN MASSACRE
AUS congresswoman spoke of the terrifying moment she was shot five times by followers of the notorious cult leader Jim Jones during the Jonestown massacre.
In November 1978, Jackie Speier, who was then a legislative assistant to California Congressman Leo Ryan, flew with her boss to investigate human rights abuses at the Jonestown commune in Guyana.
But four days later as she tried to leave with people she helped rescue from the cult, the group came under siege by his followers at the airport and Speier was shot in the arm, leg and back five times.
She survived but Congressman Leo Ryan and NBC news correspondent Don Harris were murdered during the siege, along with three others.
Speier, 68, has as detailed her horrific ordeal in a new memoir, ‘Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Finding Hope in the Darkest Places, and Breaking the Silence,’ published by Little A. Ryan eventually agreed to fly to Guyana after hearing stories of physical and mental abuse perpetrated by Jim Jones against his constituents.
He agreed to fly there with Speiers who was elected to the House herself in 2008, serving California’s 14 congressional district, and was re-elected this week. Speier brought letters from concerned relatives to some of the Jonestown inhabitants, but few were interested in reading them.
‘It was strange, I felt like I was speaking to people who had had something removed in them, like they had severed all emotional attachment to their parents and families and even identities back home,’ Speier wrote. Later on, Jonestown members put on a show for guests as ‘Jones sat on his de facto throne, beneath a black sign that read, mysteriously, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.
On the same night, members approached NBC news correspondent Don Harris with notes reading: ‘Please help us get out of Jonestown’.
Speier told the defectors to pack their things but soon Ryan and Speier were besieged by over 60 people hoping to leave.
Jim Jones soon discovered that people were planning to leave and his tone became menacing and he began to threaten those ‘committed treason’.
‘When cameras were rolling, [Jones] spoke of how he loved [his followers] and how there would always be a place for them — but those declarations would be followed by thinly veiled mutters about treason and liars,’ Speier wrote. ‘He was visibly cracking’. Speier piled almost two dozen defectors onto a dump truck to take them to Port Kaituma Airstrip in Guyana.
They subsequently heard a commotion and she turned to see Congressman Ryan emerge from a throng of people with a torn and bloodied shirt.
While trying to keep the peace, he had been attacked by a member with a knife.
Temple members then launched an attack at the airstrip from which Ryan and his company were to depart.
Speier was helping people to board a plane when a large red tractor-trailer rumbled onto the airstrip.
‘About a dozen men leapt from the tractor, leveled their automatic weapons,’ she writes.
‘Screams of shock and anguish filled the air, underscored by the rapid pounding of gunfire.
‘I dove to the ground behind the wheel of one of the airplanes and waited, as the onslaught of bullets thumped against the metal above me.
‘I was lying on my side with my head down, feigning dead, when my body was suddenly crushed by a shocking blow to my side.
‘It felt like a Mack truck had just sped over me’.
Speier was struck by five bullets fired at point blank range in her right arm, leg and back.
She recalled: ‘Indescribable pain ripped through my body, consuming me, only leaving room for a fleeting thought that I should lie still and pretend to be dead,’ she writes.
‘I remained there, paralyzed by shock, for what felt like an eternity’.
Five people, including Ryan and three members of the press, were shot and killed, and 11 others were wounded.
Soon afterwards Jones had enacted his ‘revolutionary suicide’ plan at the compound where he and his followers drank a cyanide concoction.