Wednesday, 17 September 2014

Five more Jonestown mass suicide victims identified among ashes found in Delaware


Names associated with unclaimed cremains found last month at a Dover, Del., funeral home, which include victims of the 1978 Peoples Temple mass suicide-murder in Jonestown, Guyana, were released to the public Monday.

Delaware's Division of Forensic Science said it was releasing the names in hopes of returning the cremated remains to families. The remains were found this summer in a shuttered Minus Funeral Home, and among those found were the 1978 victims of the massacre in which 911 died.

The remains of those killed in Jonestown were identified by officials as: Ottie Mese Guy, Katherine M. Domineck, Tony Walker, Irene Mason and Ruth Atkins.

The remains that were not associated with Jonestown were thought to be of people local to Delaware.

So far, the remains of five have been reunited with surviving family, according to Delaware officials. They include Jonestown victims Irra Johnson, Wanda King, Maud Perkins, and Mary Rodgers, and one deceased person who was not a Jonestown victim.

The work to identify and transfer the remains was through research by state officials. Expertise to identify Jonestown victims came from the help of "the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, the California Historical Society and other Jonestown survivors but have been unable to locate any additional family members," according to state officials in a written statement issued Monday.

The cremated remains of 38 people were found at the former funeral home in August by state officials responding to a request to check the property after containers were discovered.

Delaware officials responded in August to a request to check the former funeral home in a downtown Dover neighborhood after containers were discovered.

Seven containers of cremated remains discovered at the funeral home remain unidentified, Delaware officials said Monday.

The cremated remains of nine of the dead turned up in storage at a defunct funeral home in Dover, Delaware more than 30 years after the tragic mass suicide that took the lives of 911 Bay Area residents at Jonestown, in Guyana. The hundreds of members of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project cult headed by preacher Jim Jones died in the mass murder and suicide on Nov. 18, 1978. Jones ordered his followers to drink grape-flavored punch that turned out to be laced with cyanide. Others died after being shot by guards loyal to Jones.

The reason they ended up there is because all the bodies of the dead originally arrived back in the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base, which is home to the nation's largest military mortuary, as the AP reports. These nine unclaimed cremains were clearly lost in the shuffle, and were among 38 containers of remains discovered at the former funeral home this week.

At the time, in November 1978, after multiple cemeteries refused to accept the remains of those unclaimed and/or unidentified victims (many of the bodies that came back to the States were badly decomposed), Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland accepted 406 of the bodies, many of them children. A memorial to the victims was unveiled there in 2008.

The remains [found in Delaware] were clearly marked, with the names of the deceased included on death certificates, authorities said. But Kimberly Chandler, spokeswoman for the Delaware Division of Forensic Science, declined to release the names of the nine people to The Associated Press. Chandler said officials were working to notify relatives.

The massacre/suicide at Jonestown took place shortly after a visit from California Congressman Leo Ryan and his then aide Jackie Speier, along with a news crew from NBC, visited pastor Jim Jones and his flock of followers at the Peoples' Temple on November 17, 1978. Jones had relocated the Temple and many of his diverse group of parishioners to Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, after facing heightened media scrutiny in San Francisco and allegations of physical and sexual abuse from Temple members.

While many joined the Temple for its radically integrationist, Christian, and Socialist values, they were ultimately caught up in Jones' drug- and ego-fueled delusion, and on November 18 were ordered to drink cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid grape punch, and to give it to their children first. The few members who managed to escape reported seeing anyone who resisted either get shot, or they were forced to consume the poison. It remains the largest mass suicide in human history.

Jones himself died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and groin, most likely self-inflicted.

Wednesday 17 September 2014

http://sfist.com/2014/08/08/cremated_remains_of_nine_jonestown.php

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/15/jonestown-victims-names-peoples-temple/15684473/

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