The following people with connections to Peoples Temple have died since October 2024.
Guy Young was a former member of Peoples Temple who was in San Francisco in November 1978. His wife and numerous stepchildren died in Jonestown. He died on August 16, 2025. Bonnie Yates’ 2024 profile of Guy appears here. A shorter remembrance appears here.
Belva Davis, the first Black woman to work as a TV reporter and anchor in the Bay Area – and whose interviews with Jim Jones in the mid-1970s led to a mutual, if only professional, respect – died on September 24, 2025. She described her earliest encounters with Peoples Temple in her book, Never in My Wildest Dreams, excerpted here.
Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith, whose ministry at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland helped influence the moral and spiritual fabric of the city – and who both respected and challenged Jim Jones’ appropriation of the Black church – died on September 19, 2025. His essay on Peoples Temple, “Breaking the Silence,” appears in the book, Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America ( University of Indiana Press, 2004).
Deaths noted from previous years
Joe Sam., an artist whose works included illustrations for The Need for a Second Look at Jonestown (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989) and Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown (Inkspot Publishing, 2023), died on June 1, 2024. A remembrance by Rebecca Moore is here.