He is an actor, known for Written in Blood (2018), The People's. Jones himself, after some artfully applied pressure to the mayor's office, was appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, where once-tedious meetings about public housing suddenly erupted into vigorous cheering sessions, with temple members applauding the pronouncements of Commissioner Jones. Recent interviews with Stephan include: "Son of Anarchist: My Father, Jim Jones, and What the . Greg's body was near the boarding steps with his camera bag and cameras scattered around him. Rebelling, they refused Jones' order to come back. But mention "Jim Jones" and "Jonestown" and many people would make the connection. More than 300 Jonestown victims were children. But he also tapped into something very real and showed something very real and was very loving, especially during the early period.. To just be somewhere with a machete, in khakis, and just decide I wanted to go somewhere and cut myself a trail." 'So much was attractive and unique that we turned a blind eye on what was wrong,' he said, including his father's sexual excesses, drug abuse and rants. They have altogether three daughters. He dreams he is in a crowd, and his father is talking about suicide. He has taken a lead role in a 40th Jonestown anniversary memorial to be held Sunday at Oaklands Evergreen Cemetery, where remains of unclaimed and unidentified victims are buried. Official Sites. Partner : Ava Phenice Jones, aka Ava Phenice Brown, Ava Phenice Cobb. At first it was spanking of children. "It was the first thing I really worked hard for. Among the hundreds of corpses, only one was different; he had died from a bullet to the head. Now, Stephan Jones is father of three daughters, ages 16, 25 and 29, and works in the office furniture installation business. Jones had suffered a setback. The list of defectors rapidly grew to at least 16. }); window._taboola = window._taboola || []; He played at school. . What Does Lindsey Horans Boyfriend Tyler Heaps Do For a Living? Ryan clearly was in good spirits. Court Records. But in 1973, Johns oldest brother and a sister, along with six other California college students, quit the church and became its enemies. Then they could identify and allow themselves to step into the story and understand how such a thing could happen. Four decades later, Americans often use this phrase in political and business contexts without knowing its origin. | (As PEOPLE reported a year after the deaths, two of Stephan's adopted siblings also died at Jonestown.). Where they were lying. Joining him was an older black man who fingered something in his right pocket. When Jim Sr., a local Democratic Party darling, met with future first lady Rosalynn Carter, Jim Jr. proudly went along. 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As the visitors prepared to return to the U.S., Peoples Temple gunmen ambushed them on a remote jungle airstrip killing the congressman, Leo Ryan; three newsmen; and a church defector. "This was when he started bragging about taking 16 people on in one day, and all that crap. Sadly we were finally at a point where I felt I had enough support and we decided that we were going to take action'. And to have any fray in that fabric would cause an unraveling that he couldnt handle.. Jim Jr. would lose 15 immediate relatives in Jonestown, including his pregnant wife, Yvette Muldrow. I said there must be another way.. Play it now! someone shouted, and the driver attempted to turn the truck around. "I mellowed out." Reporters were hearing disturbing allegations about Jim Jones' church--there were stories of beatings, armed guards, extensive sexual activity. He also made sure that the other disciples who were in the capital would do nothing hasty. What Are Essential Oils and Do They Work. 'It looks like trouble,' I said to Greg Robinson, but he kept on shooting pictures. He is now a 65-year-old grandfather who has worked for a Miami hydraulics company for nearly 30 years, Jordan Vilchez, pictured sitting at a memorial for mass murder and suicide victims at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana, moved to Jonestown to 1977. Published: 01:29 EST, 14 November 2018 | Updated: 12:15 EST, 14 November 2018. I mean, here are hundreds and hundreds of people who feel differently than I do--who's right?". I would have been doing more than just leaving a family. ", Jim Jones had warned them over and over that invading soldiers would torture their children; maybe that is what they feared most, Stephan Jones says. "They say, 'Yeah.' For many years, Jones struggled with the guilt of survival, his father's grim legacy, and his own subsequent substance abuse. In addition to writing the articles below, Stephan appeared as a speaker during the Griot Institute of African Studies lecture series entitled Jonestown: 35 Years Later at Bucknell University; his presentation appears on this page (scroll down the videos). Stephanie was one of six victims in the car accident coming back from Cincinatti.Birth name: . She gave her house to the Peoples Temple and they moved to San Francisco. But a lot of the rage that I kept for years was keeping me from looking at my part and seeing what I hope I would do differently if in similar circumstances. We were trying to build a new world, a progressive socialist organization.. "I usually try to tell people when we're in a good time to talk about it, because my God, it takes two hours just to scratch the surface," Stephan Jones says. Jim Jones had adopted other children, gathering around him what he liked to call his "rainbow family"--Stephan's brothers and sisters were black and Korean--but Stephan remembers days spent mostly by himself: there was a cleared-out place in the underbrush where he could crouch and become Hercules, or a soldier of war. The rest of us were accommodated in a private home. 'Little Jimmy' became part of their 'Rainbow Family' of white, black, Korean-American and Native American children. Jim Jones charismatic, volatile and ultimately evil. We apologize, but this video has failed to load. More than 900 people lived in the agricultural mission, with its dining pavilion, tidy cottages, school, medical facilities and rows of crops. When he was ordered to Georgetown to help with supply shipments, Smith said he concocted an escape plan: Ollie and other temple singers and dancers, he believed, would soon be sent to Georgetown to perform, and the family would flee to the U.S. Embassy. NBC reported that Stephan Jones was the vice president for an office installation company in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008. Only two days later did the picture became clear. In the past, Stephan has also been known as Stephan Gandhi Jones and Stephan G Jones. The church provided free drug rehabilitation, medical care, food. Hes an executive at the office furniture company where he began working immediately after Jonestown. A vat that contained a drink laced with deadly cyanide sits on a sidewalk at Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978. He appeared in movies like Written in Blood (2018), The Peoples Advocate: The Life and Times of Charles R.Gary (2007) and The True Story (2003). He plays forward. The temple was the only life he knew but says he always had his doubts. She was the adoptive daughter of Rev. With their lives, the story of Jonestown continues, even now. And it was necessary in my own healing for me to find acceptance for him, understanding of him. Stephan Jones says he can still remember his own terror the first time his father set off a Jonestown White Night. "I think I'd probably be pretty messed up if I hadn't lost everybody I had and hadn't gone through the prison experience," Stephan told The Washington Post in 1983. tap here to see other videos from our team. "He always gave us a hug and a kiss, but it became more mechanical as time went by." He is still elated by it. Now, Stephan is a father of three daughters, ages 16, 25 and 29, and works in the office furniture installation business, Eugene Smith recalls how his mother, a churchgoing African-American, bought into Jim Jones' dream when he opened a new church in Fresno. Then two Guyanese medical evacuation planes flew us to the capital city of Georgetown, where a U.S. Air Force C-141 took us to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., stopping off on their way at the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Puerto Rico. Another hit my wrist and knocked off my watch. Stephan Jones was a nearly full-grown teen-ager when his father sent him to the Peoples Temple agricultural mission in the small South American coastal country of Guyana. It's like my hurt for them, or my missing them, is the only thing I have left of them." And the temple was his life first in Indiana, later in California. Yeah often people do. 'I'm not saying he didn't cause it, create it. Stephan Jones currently lives in Petaluma, CA; in the past Stephan has also lived in San Rafael CA and Novato CA. Im not saying he didnt cause it, create it. He has read most of "Raven," which he believes to be the best of the books about his father, but he has never been able to bring himself to read the chapter about the suicides and murders. Hes 61 now. That he was just this crazy zealot this entire time. In California, he was steeped in temple life. I guess maybe somebody who hadnt been in the temple their entire lives and was just stepping into it couldve seen it coming. A large poncho covered his belt area so no one knew for sure and no one challenged him. He was summoned to the temple radio room. He went through years of nightmares, mourning and shame. He did.'. When more than 900 people were killed at Jonestown by consuming punch laced with cyanide on Nov. 18, 1978, Stephan was not at the settlement founded by his father. The picture, he recalls, was about hit men. . Stephan Jones did not drink. Now, Stephan is a father of three daughters,. As a San Francisco high school student, he was dispatched to help build Jonestown. He was 18 and running a temple construction crew when the church sanctioned his marriage to a talented 16-year-old singer, Ollie Wideman. All these lives were wasted and I don't know why. Well, he was using these words, I dont know if hed actually do that, hes a good and gentle man in so many ways, but he wanted to take dad out, and I was the one to convince him that dad would do that himself and we were going to have chaos on our hands. My mother got me an apartment, I got a job and my father came and tried to talk me into coming back. "I wasn't there," he says. "I'm blessed to have hit enough of a bottom and to have been surrounded by amazing, wonderful, honest, compassionate and challenging people to see me through that," Stephan said. Photo by Eric Risberg / AP Some of them had started out with him in the earliest days in Indiana and moved with him to California. So yes, many people were disenchanted., Im sure he feared it and Im sure he had people telling him it existed. Over four decades, as they have built new lives, they have struggled with grief and the feeling that they were pariahs. stephan gandhi jonesNitro Acoustic. And I say, 'My name is Jones.' And the temple was his life - first in Indiana, later in California. I noticed them in real time. After years of struggles that included drug addiction, Jones says hes now living a pleasant life in the United States with his wife and three daughters. stephan gandhi jones Tatko na pesmaricu. View their profile including current address, phone number 415-785-XXXX, background check reports, and property record on Whitepages, the most trusted online directory. Then there were just a few. Other people were injured. . For the young Caucasian, there was more: "The white man was so preached against by my father as a way of winning black people, and here I am a white man, feeling like everybody resents me and I have something to apologize for," he says. He was right, of course. According to former members, Jones would not tolerate defections from the mission project and many of the church members considered those who leave to be traitors. They are Agnes Pauline Jones, Timothy Glen Jones, Jim Jon Prokes, Jim W. Jones Jr, Lew Eric Jones, John Moss Jones, Suzanne O. Jones, and Stephanie Jones. Write by: . The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid, meaning to follow someone blindly, was born that day in Guyana. The reason that I have agreed to talk to as many people as I have is because of that. He thinks now that it is probably stupid to believe that. File photo: Bodies of Peoples Temple mass suicide victims led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, November 1978. We couldn't know then that the grim little world of this sick man would shatter within hours, taking hundreds of his followers to their deaths. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he still has the position of. }); window._taboola = window._taboola || []; She gave her house to the Peoples Temple and they moved to San Francisco, where Eugene ran a temple construction crew. He says his daughters have seen him gnash his teeth when he talks. As a self-taught bulldozer operator, he worked alongside other Peoples Temple members in the humid heat, his blade carving roads and sites for wooden buildings with metal roofs. My arm was gushing blood so I stripped off my belt and pinched down the biggest wounds. He was the son of Jim Jones, who established Jonestown. 'Hit the deck!' I guess I wanted to believe that, as a child.". I heard a few more shots and saw the tractor pull away. Of those 25 percent that drank the poison, most of those people were just defeated and didnt know where else to turn and didnt want to run out on the others. The bottom layer consisted of about 300 babies and small children whose bodies had been ravished by the humidity and jungle insects. 'They're in deep trouble now,' observed one of the relatives who had accompanied us. But the boy was still a child of the Temple. 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