30 years after, the legacy of Jonestown

Personal connection to the tragedy
Rebecca Moore, who lost her two sisters and nephew that day, is chairwoman of the religious studies department at San Diego State University, and when she teaches about new religions and death and dying, she talks about her personal connection to the tragedy.

She and her husband launched a Web site dedicated to conveying the humanity of temple members she feels were dehumanized by photos of their bodies and dismissed as robotic cultists.

Moore thinks her sisters, socially conscious daughters of a minister, were true temple believers to the end. Still, she cannot fathom how they could have joined in planning murders and suicides.

"Jones did not buy the poison and mix it," she said. "Others tested it on pigs. Others, including my sisters, wrote letters about how to kill people. ... What is baffling is why people would participate in something so inhumane."

Private reunions, 30 years later
Thirty years later, dozens of surviving members come together for private reunions because they still value their friendship, the temple's sense of community and their utopian dream of a world free of racism and injustice.

Lenny Ignelzi / AP Rebecca Moore, the Chairwoman for Religious Studies at San Diego University, sits in her office, Monday, Oct. 27, in San Diego. Moores' two sisters were aides to Jim Jones and died in Jonestown 30 years ago.

"I go because I feel so strongly about the need for and power of forgiveness and understanding," said Stephan Jones, the minister's son. He was 19, and in Georgetown with other basketball team members on the temple's last day. "I've come to believe a group of people can see the same thing and each come away with a completely different perspective and all be right in the moment," he said. "We had ideas of a greater mission, and now we have found a way to be together that is harmonious and healing and are better able to make a difference in the world."

Today, he is the father of three daughters and is the vice president of a small Bay Area office installation and services company.

In Jonestown's aftermath, Stephan hated his father. But he has come to recognize that the capacity for good and evil, and mental sickness, coexisted in Jones.

"We don't want to face our own responsibility or part in what happened and feel ashamed for being duped or manipulated," he said. "We look for someone else to blame. I realized over time that there was a great need to forgive him, then I could forgive myself."

The unidentifiable or unclaimed bodies of more than 400 of Jonestown's dead, most of them children, are interred in a mass grave at an Oakland Cemetery overlooking San Francisco Bay. Each year a memorial service is conducted on Nov. 18.

Eugene Smith, who lost his wife, their infant son and his mother, went to the grave site years ago but has not returned. Fate had put him in Georgetown the day they perished, but he likes to think he would have resisted the madness in Jonestown, as he believes his wife did.

Now working as a research analyst for California's transportation department, Smith has neither remarried nor fathered more children.

"None of us are survivors; we just got away," he said. "For all of us who were not in Jonestown, part of us died there."

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