Jim Jones
James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass suicide in 1978 of 914 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, and the murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip. Over 200 children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.
Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved to California, and both gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the mid-1970s.
The incident in Guyana ranks among the largest mass suicides in history, though most likely it involved forced suicide and/or murder, and was the single greatest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001. Among the dead was Leo Ryan, who remains the only Congressman assassinated in the line of duty in US history.
Read more about Jim Jones: Early Life, Jonestown's Formation and Operation, Visit By Congressman Ryan, Murders, Other Issues, Family Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words jim and/or jones:
“Just kids! That’s about the craziest argument I’ve ever heard. Every criminal in the world was a kid once. What does it prove?”
—Theodore Simonson. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Jim Bird, The Blob, responding to the suggestion that they not lock up the teens pulling the alien “prank,” (1958)
“All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once in a long while an extravagance.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)