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NBC News report on Guyana Massacre
Part 1 of 2: NBC News, Sunday, November 19, 1978: Edwin Newman hosts a special on the Jonestown, Guyana massacre. From Wikipedia: Jonestown was a short-lived settlement made in northwestern Guyana by the Peoples Temple, a cult from California. Jonestown became lastingly and internationally notorious in 1978 when 913 people died in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by their leader, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement thus also became a term for that incident. Named after Jones, Jonestown was founded on his initiative in the mid-1970s as a socialist agricultural commune. It stood amidst jungle, about seven miles (11 km) southwesterly from Port Kaituma. At its height, Jonestown's population consisted of about one thousand of Jones' followers and their families, but most residents lived there for under a year. In November 1978, United States Congressman Leo Ryan led reporters and a delegation of concerned relatives of Peoples Temple members on a visit to Jonestown to investigate allegations of abuses there. The visit ended in the murders of Ryan and four others by members of the Peoples Temple, shot at the Port Kaituma airstrip as they were about to fly out. That evening, November 18, Jones led his followers in their mass murder-suicide. Approximately nine hundred men, women and children perished, along with Jones, who died from a gunshot wound. Jonestown was shortly abandoned by the collapsing remnant of the Peoples Temple. Afterward, it was at first tended by the Guyanese government, which allowed its re-occupation by Hmong refugees from Laos for a few years in the early 1980s, but it has since been altogether deserted.[1] It was looted but otherwise avoided by the local Guyanese and mostly destroyed by a fire in the mid-1980s, leaving the site as an abandoned ruin.