Nearly four decades have passed since that afternoon Tracy Parks knelt on the rain-soaked, muddy airstrip in Guyana, cradling her mother’s lifeless body in her hands, shaking her in a desperate attempt to wake her up.
But for Parks, it feels like it happened just yesterday.
The explosion of gunfire had stopped, but all around her lay bullet-ridden bodies — some dead, others bleeding and moaning. “Get in the jungle,” her father Jerry screamed. “Run.”
Tracy, then 12, looked up to see her older sister Brenda sprinting across the airport runway toward the dark wall of trees. Before she knew it, she was running right behind her, racing toward the dense rainforest.
“I felt like I wasn’t in my body,” Tracy recalls in the new seriesPeople Magazine Investigates: Cults, airing Monday, June 11 at 9 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery. “We were so scared, we just kept running.”
Jonathan Sprague/Redux
Their bodies, along with that of the cult’s leader, Jim Jones, now lay rotting seven miles away in the blistering equatorial heat at the group’s compound, known as Jonestown.
• For more on how Tracy Parks escapedJonestown,subscribe now to PEOPLEor pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands now.
Kayt Jones
Today, 40 years later, Parks — one of the youngest Peoples Temple members to escape the largest mass suicide in modern history — still struggles to cope with the trauma.
It was the scandal that rocked America’s most storied political family and changed the course of presidential history.PEOPLE‘s first-ever podcast,Cover-Up, dives into the Chappaquiddick scandal and attempts to piece together what happened in the hours after Ted Kennedy’s car went over a narrow wooden bridge, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Subscribe now onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Playor wherever podcasts are available.
Ken Hawkins/AP/Rex/Shutterstock
“This wasn’t suicide,” insists Parks, 51, now a California day care owner. “This was murder. Those children didn’t want to die and neither did many of the adults.”
People Magazine Investigates: Cultsairs Monday (9 p.m. ET) on Investigation Discovery.
source: people.com
