Word: airstrips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...another hearing in Guyana last week, Larry Layton, the cult member who pretended he wanted to return home with Congressman Leo Ryan and ended up taking part in the shooting at the airstrip, was charged with the Congressman's murder. Another cult survivor testified at Layton's pretrial hearing that Jones himself had talked about the need for Ryan's death and predicted that his plane would "fall out of the sky." Survivors returning to the U.S. have told the FBI that the cult's basketball team, to which Jones' natural son Stephan...
Ryan took along eight newsmen as well as several relatives of temple members, who hoped to persuade their kin to leave the colony. The visitors arrived in a chartered aircraft, an 18-seat De Havilland Otter, at an airstrip in Port Kaituma, six miles from Jonestown. They rode to the colony along a muddy and barely passable road through the jungle in a tractor-drawn flat-bed trailer. At Jonestown all were greeted warmly by a smiling Jones...
...tractor crossed the airstrip. The men in it suddenly picked up guns and began firing at the people near the Otter. Before he could seek cover, Ron Javers of the San Francisco Chronicle was hit in the left shoulder. He crawled behind a plane wheel. NBC Cameraman Bob Brown stayed on his feet, filming the approaching riflemen. "He was incredibly tenacious," Javers reported. "Then I saw him go down. And I saw one of the attackers stick a shotgun right into his face?inches away, if that. Bob's brain was blown out of his head. It splattered...
...survivors spent a night of terror in a small bar near the Port Kaituma airstrip. They feared that the Jonestown gunmen would return to finish their deadly task. Drinking coffee laced with rum through the long night, the defectors from Jones' colony told how far their community had fallen from their Utopian ideal. They lived in fear, one reported, because "Jim Jones said the Guyanese government gave him authority to shoot anybody who tried to leave...
After the Ryan party left for the airstrip, the two lawyers took a walk, comparing impressions of the visit. When they returned to the center of the village, they found all its residents assembled in the meeting hall. "You and Mark better not attend because tension is running pretty high against you," Jones told Garry. He and Lane retreated to a guest house several hundred feet from the pavilion...