Anonymous ID: 717b38 Jan. 10, 2020, 7:46 p.m. No.7779706   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Reporter's 1978 account of deadly ambush, Jonestown tragedy

 

Forty years ago this week, a California congressman and a group of journalists traveled to South America to see Jonestown, a remote settlement created by an American church, and investigate reports of abuses of members.

 

As the visitors prepared to return to the U.S., Peoples Temple gunmen ambushed them on a jungle airstrip, killing the congressman, Leo Ryan; three newsmen; and a church defector. The shooting triggered the mass murders and suicides in Jonestown of more than 900 people orchestrated by the Rev. Jim Jones.

 

Then-San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman was wounded in the airstrip shooting and flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he wrote the following eyewitness account. It appeared in the Examiner on Nov. 20, 1978, two days after the tragedy.

 

https://apnews.com/eda81af2599d485ab09eb39d72754ade