http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JonestownJonestown
Jonestown was the short-lived settlement made in northwestern Guyana by the Peoples Temple, a cult from California. Jonestown became lastingly and internationally notorious in 1978, when nearly its whole population died in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by their leader, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement thus became, also, a term for that incident. The site is now an abandoned ruin.
Named after Jones, Jonestown was founded on his initiative in the mid-1970s, as an agricultural commune. It stood amidst jungle, about seven miles (11 km) southwesterly from Port Kaituma. Jonestown's population was about one thousand, once it was fully established and the bulk of Jones' followers had moved to it, but most of them lived there for under a year.
In November of 1978, United States Congressman Leo Ryan, accompanied by reporters and a delegation of concerned relatives of Peoples Temple members, visited 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. Somewhat over nine hundred men, women and children perished, Jones among them.
The children were poisoned first. Aides took the children from their parents and brought them to stand in line. Some parents apparently went with their children. Poison was squirted into children's mouths with plastic syringes. Eyewitness Stanley Clayton, who was assisting already-poisoned children, reports that many children resisted and were physically forced to swallow by guards and nurses. With regards to the frequent assertion that the adults committed consensual suicide, it could be argued that it was the shock of the deaths of the community's 287 children that caused the adults to go to their own deaths with (allegedly) little or no resistance.
According to Clayton, the poison was extremely effective, causing death within about five minutes. After consuming the poison, according to Clayton, people were then escorted away and told to lie down along walkways and areas out of view of the people who were still being dosed, perhaps because anyone who believed this was just another rehearsal would be dissuaded at seeing people convulsing and dying.
The audio tape records numerous "screams" and "anguished cries" (Jones' words), from women and children. Clayton reported being in close contact with many such dying victim children.