{"id":109669,"date":"2021-04-12T17:01:38","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T00:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=109669"},"modified":"2024-04-24T17:23:40","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T00:23:40","slug":"the-u-s-government-and-delaware","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=109669","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Government and Delaware"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, November 23, 1978 \u2013 five days after the deaths in Jonestown \u2013 the first bodies arrived via U.S. military transport at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for processing, identification, and notification of next-of-kin. Documentation of the decision to transport the bodies to the East Coast \u2013 if, in fact, there is documentation, rather than the decisions being made in telephone calls among White House, State Department and Pentagon officials \u2013 has yet to be discovered.<\/p>\n

However, the decisions were made, they were controversial and had far-reaching implications. The aircraft may have flown in and out of a U.S. military airbase, but once within Delaware\u2019s borders, the bodies were subject to state laws regarding autopsies, jurisdiction and authority of state-licensed mortuaries, disposition of the bodies (interment, cremation, burial at sea), transport of the bodies within the state, etc. There were also political considerations: would the people of Delaware welcome or even tolerate the burial of \u201ccultists\u201d within the state; would a mass burial site \u2013 in the words of the first document below \u2013 become \u201ca cult memorial which would become the site of a mecca of all sorts of curiosity seekers\u201d?<\/p>\n

The following two records discuss several of these issues. The first is an undated State Department memo \u2013 the latest cited date is December 9 \u2013 summarizing previous meetings with Delaware state officials and addressing outstanding issues. The second, also undated \u2013 although it refers to a telephone conversation on January 22, 1979, and was written in preparation for a legislative hearing on January 25 \u2013 originates from Dover AFB and reports on how the military is handling those same issues.<\/p>\n

Talking Points For State Department Delaware Meeting<\/a><\/p>\n

Dover AFB Prepares Testimony for State Legislative Hearing<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The decisions to transport the bodies to Dover instead of California were controversial for family members as well. As Rebecca Moore, the sister of two of the Jonestown dead and the aunt of another, wrote in her article, Last Rights<\/a><\/em> (1988):<\/p>\n

We were puzzled that the Air Force didn\u2019t take the victims to Oakland Army Base in California, site of a large military mortuary which had processed bodies during the Vietnam War. Most of the victims\u2019 families lived in California, where Peoples Temple was headquartered. It would have been easy to request, and obtain, medical records, especially from San Francisco. Finally, the bodies would not have had to be shipped across country for burial, an impossible expense for many relatives. Moving the bodies from one distant place to another \u2013 Guyana to Delaware \u2013 continued to alienate relatives from their dead.<\/p>\n

Newspapers and officials gave two reasons for taking the bodies to Dover. First, it was closer to Guyana. Transporting them to Oakland, or to Travis Air Force Base fifty miles north, would have required the planes to stop en route for refueling. Second, the Dover mortuary was supposed to be better equipped to handle a large number of dead people. A few years earlier it had processed 327 bodies of Americans killed in an air crash at Tenerife, Canary Islands.\u2026<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s stated reasons for choosing Delaware are totally fabricated, since most of the people working on the Jonestown bodies did not normally work at the Dover mortuary. The volunteers and specialists could have worked anywhere.<\/p>\n

We believe the bodies went to Dover simply because they would be close to government bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who might have to travel there. We also believe the Air Force flew the victims to Delaware rather than California because the government didn\u2019t want to be hassled by relatives. NBC Nightly News reported that Dover was selected because of its \u201cdistance from California, thus reducing chances of families crowding the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

As far as we were concerned, dumping the bodies at Dover \u2014 3000 miles from the Temple\u2019s headquarters \u2014 demonstrated extreme callousness on the part of the U.S. government. Coupled with the State Department\u2019s desire to bury everyone in Guyana, we felt the government forgot that the bodies had once been people, with kin who still loved them.<\/p>\n

People in San Francisco and California were more sympathetic than the people of Delaware. The Temple was a California institution. Unlike Delaware, the San Francisco bay area has a large black population. If the move to Dover was calculated to dilute sympathy for the victims, it worked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[Editor\u2019s note<\/strong>: The documents above were uncovered by independent researcher Brian Csuk, who received them in response to his request for agency records under the Freedom of Information Act.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, November 23, 1978 \u2013 five days after the deaths in Jonestown \u2013 the first bodies arrived via U.S. military transport at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for processing, identification, and notification of next-of-kin. Documentation of the decision to transport the bodies to the East Coast \u2013 if, in fact, there is documentation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":13689,"menu_order":19,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-109669","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/109669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109669"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/109669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126990,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/109669\/revisions\/126990"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}