How many people died on November 18? How many survived?

There were 918 people who died in Guyana on November 18. The death toll at Jonestown was 909, with two confirmed gunshot deaths and the balance dying by cyanide poisoning. Five people – including Congressman Leo Ryan, three members of the media who accompanied his party, and one Jonestown defector – who were shot to death at the Port Kaituma airstrip. Finally, four Temple members died at the group's Georgetown house when a mother herded her children into an upstairs bathroom, slit their throats, and then took her own life with the knife.

For more information, and for the list of people who died, see http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/WhoDied/whodied.htm.

The number of survivors depends upon one's definition of “survivor.” Generally on this website, we describe survivors as those who were in Guyana on November 18 and who survived the deaths. That is not an attempt to minimize the anguish and struggles which the members of Peoples Temple in California felt upon hearing of the deaths in Guyana. Rather, that is a much larger, less quantifiable number beyond our abilities to determine.

With that in mind, we can identify about 75-80 Temple members who survived. They included:

• Hyacinth Thrash and Grover Cleveland Davis, two elderly residents in Jonestown who slept through the deaths;

• Stanley Clayton and Odell Rhodes, two young black men who (independently of each other) decided not to participate in the deaths;

• Tim Carter, Michael Carter, and Mike Prokes, who were dispatched by the Jonestown leadership to carry money to the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown (Prokes committed suicide four months later);

• 15 defectors who accompanied Leo Ryan's congressional party from Jonestown and who came under attack at the airstrip;

• An unknown number (between 10 and 20) of Jonestown residents who left the community on the morning of 18 November and walked to Matthews Ridge;

The balance of the survivors were Temple members in Georgetown. Some were part of the group's logistical base in Guyana's capital, some were in the city for business or medical reasons, and some were there to participate in a basketball tournament.

For more information, and for the complete list of people who survived, see http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/WhoDied/whosurvived_list.htm.