![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/02-silverstein.jpeg\")
<\/a>My mother and Linda were not close. The stories she tells sound mostly like typical sibling conflict but sometimes hint at a higher level of dysfunction. For example, my mom describes how Linda locked her in the closet for hours because she didn\u2019t want her younger sister bothering her while she played with her friends. They grew further apart as they moved into adulthood while Linda studied at UC-Berkeley, and my mom embraced the hippie\/nomad lifestyle and focused on her training as a Tai Chi practitioner.<\/p>\n
My mom is now 77 years old and lives a few blocks away from me in an assisted living home. She has Parkinson\u2019s disease, which occasionally creates minor instances of confusion but she\u2019s quite lucid for the most part. That said, she hass always struggled with recounting long-term memories. I\u2019ve tried really hard since childhood to prompt her to recount memories or details about Linda and the kids but have had little success.<\/p>\n
I grew up believing that Linda and her children must have been murdered at a meeting where she was a member of Jim Jones \u201cchurch\u201d group. My mother once told me that she\u2019d met Jim Jones and described him as a charismatic, intelligent man. A few years later, I learned more about the Jonestown massacre but assumed that my aunt and cousins died prior to the atrocities that took place in Guyana. To this day, I\u2019m not sure if my mom was protecting me from the gruesome details, or if the lack of details she provided led to me creating the narrative I carried.<\/p>\n
Part of my investigation over the years had included online searches for obituaries or news articles. I always found it odd when I couldn\u2019t find anything about an apparent quadruple homicide. This all changed last year, when I stumbled upon an online post related to an upcoming HBO docuseries about Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. As I\u2019d done over the years, I Googled Linda\u2019s name and a few variations of the words \u201cdeath,\u201d \u201cmurder,\u201d \u201cJim Jones,\u201d and \u201cJonestown.\u201d This time, one of the top results I clicked on opened the door to a very different reality than anything I\u2019d discovered previously. It was a listing on a website used to find graves and details about deceased people. This was the first time in my life I\u2019d ever heard the name Sharon Amos. Armed with this new important detail, I searched again and literally stayed up all night reading the mountain of new information that came my way. This was also the night I discovered this website.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent the past year reading, watching videos, and speaking with Jonestown survivors w knew Sharon, as well as other\u2019s that have inside information about her membership in Peoples Temple and the way her life ended with her children in Georgetown. The things I\u2019ve learned about her participation in the group are upsetting. The way my cousins died is disturbing, to say the least. However, the more I learn, the more I realize that I\u2019ll never fully understand her motivations. She has been described as highly intelligent, relentlessly effective, and very committed to the initiatives she signed onto as a member of Peoples Temple.<\/p>\n
You may have noticed that I\u2019m not quite sure what to call her. To me, Linda is my aunt and the mother of my cousins. Sharon is a villain who probably started out with good intentions that got away from her and led to her murdering her children and taking her own life.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m in no position to write the history of their lives and deaths in Peoples Temple, but I\u2019m going to try and summarize it for anyone who is unfamiliar with the details. Sharon was a longtime member and leader within Jim Jones\u2019 group. She was also known as Linda Harris and Sharon Harris, following her marriage to Sherwin Harris. Her daughter Liane Harris, who was 22 at the time of her death, was a child of that union. Her other children were Christa and Martin Amos, who were 10 and 9 respectively when they died.<\/p>\n
Sharon was in charge of the Temple headquarters in Georgetown and oversaw communications to and from Jim Jones and others in Jonestown, about 150 miles away. She met with government leaders and worked to advance the cause of independence for the group and possible alliances with other socialist movements around the world.<\/p>\n Sharon and her three children were in Georgetown during the second week of November 1978, when California Representative Leo Ryan and his entourage arrived in Guyana. She apparently met and talked with him there. She was still in Georgetown on November 18, when Ryan was assassinated, and the murders and suicides of 909 people in Jonestown began. During the course of that afternoon, she received a radio call from Jones ordering her to gather other group members, kill their enemies in Georgetown with knives, and then kill themselves. Unable to rally other members for this gruesome task, she took her children into the bathroom where she cut the younger children\u2019s throats. Then she and Liane simultaneously slashed each other\u2019s throats. There are other theories, but the evidence and witness accounts leave no doubt in my mind that Sharon is responsible for these deaths.<\/p>\n Even though I never knew them, it\u2019s painful imagining a different outcome. I was raised without a father and grew up with my two siblings Daniel and Lilia. I have no aunts, uncles, cousins, or biological grandparents, although I did have loving people who informally adopted me as their grandchild. I don\u2019t bring this up for sympathy, but to illustrate why the loss of my only aunt and cousins has had a significant impact on my life. It\u2019s been a rollercoaster of emotions trying to come to terms with the loss of my family members as I\u2019ve explored this over the past year. I don\u2019t know if it makes a difference, and I have no intention of marking a distinction between the losses of their lives compared to those who died in Jonestown. However, I feel especially saddened knowing that the only Peoples Temple members who died that day outside of Jim Jones\u2019 reach were my aunt and cousins. Every life lost that terrible day is a tragedy and the entire thing is senseless, but it leaves me asking the endless question, \u201cwhy.\u201d Why did the other members in Georgetown choose differently? Why were they capable of making a smarter decision to stay alive while my cousins died at the hands of their own mother? What did she think she was saving them from?<\/p>\n What I have learned about Peoples Temple and the Jonestown massacre helps fill in some of the gaps. I\u2019ve learned about good people, many of whom believed they were part of a movement to change the world for the better. I\u2019ve learned about their leader, Jim Jones, who used manipulation and trickery to advance what I believe to be his overall cause of satisfying his own ego. I\u2019ve learned a little about Sharon from those who knew her. They\u2019ve been kind in describing her good points, but also described her as one of Jones\u2019 most unflinching followers. I\u2019ve learned about my cousins as well, they seem to have been sweet, considerate, highly intelligent, and a joy to be around. I wish I knew more. I wish I knew them. I wish I could talk to them today, but that ship has sailed.<\/p>\n I\u2019d love to learn more and appreciate the support I\u2019ve received from everyone I\u2019ve contacted through this site. I would also love to correspond with anyone who has a story to share or insights about the life or death of Linda (Sharon), Liane, Christa, and Martin, so please feel free to contact me anytime. I can be reached at august.silverstein@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who is Sharon Amos? I\u2019m the wrong person to ask because I never knew her. I grew up with an awareness that my aunt Linda Silverstein apparently died with her three children in the late 1970\u2019s. In this world of Google and Wikipedia, I\u2019d always found it odd that I couldn\u2019t find any information about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":70528,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-70541","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70541","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70541"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106538,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70541\/revisions\/106538"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>