Only natural son of Rev. In the past, Stephan has also been known as Stephan Gandhi Jones and Stephan G Jones. 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. stephan gandhi jones. He led the Peoples Temple, a new religious movement, between 1955 and 1978. He saw that the jungle would make him a man. The expression was born of the perception that Jim Jones disciples were gullible people who gladly drank the poison because their leader told them it would do them good. And he faked getting shot in Redwood Valley [California] when I was still pretty young, and we felt like we were in danger much of the time. He keeps his voice very soft, as though practice has taught him to hold certain subjects to a whisper in public, but his gaze is direct. Stephan Jones' mother was one of those found dead from cyanide poisoning. Over four decades, as they have built new lives, they have struggled with grief and the feeling that they were pariahs. Because people were disenchanted with him by that time? Stephan escaped death with the Jonestown basketball team, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple. Jim Jones. The murders and suicides were unfolding, 150 miles away. I had been up all night unloading boats and I had to be at work in a couple of hours so I lay down for two hours of sleep after backbreaking and dangerous work, and Dad comes on the speaker in the wee hours of the morning. There are moments when he glimpses the edges of power and understands precisely how it might be used. I make a point of avoiding pointing fingers and giving specific names. It was planned as a grand event, the Peoples Temple team against the Guyanese national team, and when the Rev. (As PEOPLE reported a year after the deaths, two of Stephan's adopted siblings also died at Jonestown.). Instead of finishing high school, Vilchez moved to San Francisco, where she lived in the church. "This is really crazy," he recalls thinking. I would argue that the means justify the end, but not the other way around.. Stephan Gandhi Jones was 19. He will read it when he is ready, he says. Because Dad was such a mess . Afterwards, the 19-year-old Stephan was put in jail for three months in the South American nation before the case against him was thrown out. A black man with a 'corn rows' hairstyle came up to the rear of the truck. John was attending a San Francisco high school when he was allowed to join his best friends in Jonestown. Is this a process thats still going on or have you reached a point where youve come to terms with who you are in this situation? . The temple really became my family, she said. He is an actor, known for Written in Blood (2018), The People's. And as the years go on, Stephan is still willing to talk about his connection to one of the biggest tragedies in American history even as he tries to live a peaceful life far removed from Jonestown. He would rise before dawn, pick his way into the bush, and sit without moving as the quiet around him split slowly into bird cries and insect buzzing and the scuffling and calling of creatures he could not see. the whole thing he drove into people's minds for so long--I certainly don't mean to say that what happened was a sane act or that it was a good act, but--", Jones hesitates. . When John Cobb was born in 1960 in a black section of Indianapolis, his mother and older siblings already were temple members. I see it in politics, I see it in advertising, I see it in a variety of places, and I feel theres no more pernicious or toxic belief than that. There were many photographs of the bodies, taken from various angles, in color and black and white, and in each photograph, as though defying the viewer even to believe the report of the camera, row upon row of clothed human backs lay swelling in the jungle damp. "I don't care what you think of my father," Jones wrote in 2015. STEPHAN Gandhi Jones is - in the eyes of the world - the son of a mass murderer. Some scowling faces appeared in the windows that rainy afternoon, watching the defectors leave, some with trunks and others with little more than the clothes on their backs. The first attacks on the town, I thought they were real. Each day's news bulletins compounded the already unimaginable: There were 400 bodies; there were 900 bodies; there were, in the precise wording of the American military men sent to investigate, "smaller bodies under larger bodies and children under those." 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. More than 900 people lived in the agricultural mission, with its dining pavilion, tidy cottages, school, medical facilities and rows of crops. View their profile including current address, phone number 415-785-XXXX, background check reports, and property record on Whitepages, the most trusted online directory. Also dead was Bob Brown, the NBC cameraman and the kind of guy who loved action stories. All of us were falling and slipping through the mud around a six-wheel-drive dump truck that would take us (the congressional delegation, the press, the defectors and a group of concerned relatives of temple members) to the Port Kaituma airstrip. And the temple was his life first in Indiana, later in California. . Instead, The Washington Post reported that Stephan escaped death with the Jonestown basketball team. He apparently was searching for his wife, who had carried away their child that morning, hoping to escape the settlement. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. They are amused; they embrace him. I keep remembering what Jones had said in the pavilion. "I still get very angry," Stephan Jones says. Stephan Jones, Jim Jones's sole surviving child, was born in Indiana, United States, on June 1, 1959. How Twins Megan Rapinoe and Rachael Rapinoe are Breaking Barriers for the LGBTQ+ Community? . His handshake was weak. Jim Jones. "I remember being afraid when he started talking about it, and getting butterflies," he says. He fired at me, but it misfired. 'What we were calling the cause really was Jim,' she said. Stephan Jones was born on June 1, 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA as Stephan Gandhi Jones. And it was necessary in my own healing for me to find acceptance for him, understanding of him. The silence could mean only one thing: An ambush was awaiting them. The younger man demanded that everyone in the truck move aside. 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. We demanded to see the locked buildings where some members lived in crowd, uncomfortable conditions. "Who they spoke to. Jim Jones himself did not drink the poison. I certainly felt there was an outside threat, even when I knew my father was full of it and I was at odds with him in Jonestown. They have three children. Swollen to bursting, that was the corpse of Jim Jones, the man who had conducted this concert of death. In the aftermath, he built a new life. I believe that it was always a personal agenda for my father, and yes, there was a gradual shift in the balance. 'Baby killer. stephan gandhi jonesNitro Acoustic. All the people who lay there around him had followed him. Toward Nov. 18 they crowd up faster and closer, but even in the spring and summer, when the anniversary is tucked safely off on the other side of the year, even then he cannot keep the dreams away. He imagines the guards with guns, and the sky clouding over, and the air suddenly wild with fear, and the sight of the children. He loves basketball; he is agile and strong and was tall even before he reached high school. Jim Jr. would go on to lose 15 immediate relatives in Jonestown, including his pregnant wife, Yvette Muldrow, In the aftermath, Jim Jr. built a new life. It won't work.' As a San Francisco high school student, he was dispatched to help build Jonestown. Dozens of members in Guyana slipped out of Jonestown or happened to be away that day. There, as part of Jones personal security detail, Cobb saw the once captivating minister strung out on drugs, afraid to venture anywhere for fear of his legal problems. This November 1978 file photo shows the Peoples Temple compound, led by Jim Jones, after bodies were removed, in Jonestown, Guyana. The 59-year-old, Jim Jones son Stephan Jones has gone through a lot after the mass massacre in Jonestown led by his father, Late Jim Jones on Nov. 18, 1978. He was ill from when he was very young and was using fear to control me when I was barely more than a toddler. More than 300 Jonestown victims were children. 'I was his son.' In "Raven," Reiterman and Jacobs describe the minister presenting the congregation with a batch of fruit punch: "We're going to drink poison and kill ourselves," Jim Jones declared, and it was not until many people had drunk that Jones said he had simply wished to test his followers' loyalty. To cope, he says he abused drugs and exercised obsessively. I wondered why it happened. She gives us the order that we were supposed to kill ourselves, Vilchez recalled. 'We think he's got a gun. }); window._taboola = window._taboola || []; 'People ask, 'How can you ever be proud of your father?'' ', 'I argued with my Dad,' he said. She gave her house to the Peoples Temple and they moved to San Francisco, where Eugene ran a temple construction crew. Neither were the White Nights where everyone stayed up, armed with machetes to fight enemies who never arrived. What Does Lindsey Horans Boyfriend Tyler Heaps Do For a Living? People were completely fatigued, exhausted. One day, when she was in high school, she came home and told her parents that her religion class had discussed Peoples Temple; only then did her father share the story of how his family was nearly wiped out. He said he considered it a failing on his part when he did. 1978. Did You Know Soccer Player Crystal Dunns Husband Pierre Soubrier Is A Football Specialist? I wouldnt say that I dont have problems saying no, and I do quite a bit, so Im feeling it now because I traveled to New York and had a long interview yesterday [with CNN]. And there was more social rhetoric and action in my life and a lot more fear. "I see a potential for me to get out of hand," Stephan Jones says, resting his chin on his hand and looking steadily at his visitor. Yet he submitted to a new search, then returned to his seat. He was summoned to the temple radio room. The reports were wrong, they say. My mother, trying to appease him, made him promise that he wouldnt leave me down there. Read more about cookies here. Jones had suffered a setback. Partner : Ava Phenice Jones, aka Ava Phenice Brown, Ava Phenice Cobb. "It was the first thing I really worked hard for. And I just flew out of bed, grabbed my ax, walked out to the post that was supporting the speaker and raised the ax like I was going to cut it down. In Indianapolis, he served as a student pastor in the Methodist Church in 1952 but. The tournament was in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital, 150 miles away. . But in 1973, John's oldest brother and a sister, along with six other California college students, quit the church and became its enemies. Suddenly there was no money to buy lumber or supplies--"he was such a tightwad," Stephan Jones says--and the homesteading fervor gave way to the minister's incessant meetings and group lectures and warnings about "enemies.". Well, once we got to California and we were going to public school, there it was very evident to me that my life was very different from the lives of most of the other kids. He too was a member of the basketball team. In his spare time he swims, or rides his bicycle, or lifts weights, or plays basketball. Maybe they saw no hope--because they didn't see themselves leaving, but they didn't want to go on with Jim Jones. Within minutes, the aide and her three children lay dead in a bloody bathroom, their throats slit. _taboola.push({ It was Harris who had been contacted by the first two groups of temple members expressing a desire to leave. But she wasn't in the truck and the men left. As for those people in his life, NBC reported in a 2008 article that Stephan has three daughters and there's a photo of Stephan presumably with one of his daughters on the Alternative Considerations website. Save record . He's 61 now. Jones, 44, is the only biological son of Jim Jones and his wife Marceline Baldwin who founded the cult behind Jonestown. "I'd go back in a minute. This November 1978 file photo shows the bodies of Peoples Temple mass suicide victims led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana. You're not taking any more drugs." Stephan Gandhi Joneswas the biological son of Jim and Marceline Jones. The next day, when soldiers of the Guyanese army, one of the most ragged in South America, hesitantly entered the Jonestown compound, they were blinded by the thick morning mist. Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, poses for a portrait near San Rafael, California, November 13, 2008. At the temple-exit guard post, the truck was halted. With their lives, the story of Jonestown continues, even now. At first it was spanking of children. Reviews. Vilchez was dispatched to the Guyanese capital of Georgetown to raise money. We used curtains for bandages. His LinkedIn profile indicates that he still has the position of. . Its nose wheel had been broken the week before and four soldiers were guarding it with M-I6 rifles. I focused my rage on Dad and his circle, rather than deal with me, he said. How could that be suicide? It began with a note smuggled to us from two members. I said there must be another way.. 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. Rev. But the reality is that it was far from a mass suicide. someone hollered as we scrambled over the gravel to the far side of the plane. They felt there was an outside threat, and that was hammered into them. placement: 'Right Rail Thumbnails', The church provided free drug rehabilitation, medical care, food. As outlined in the above video, he was featured in the History Channel's 2007 documentary Jonestown: Paradise Lost and has written for the website Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple, which is run by San Diego State University. He seems to have a tragic life after what had happened with his family. After all, we had seen things we weren't supposed to see. Former Peoples Temple member Jim Jones Jr. carries a bucket of bleached rocks to place around the edges of the Jonestown victim memorial in the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, Jim Jones Jr. was adopted by the Joneses in Indiana in 1960. Stephan Jones was born on June 1, 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA as Stephan Gandhi Jones. Thank goodness he lived before me.". Then-San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman was wounded in the airstrip shooting and flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he wrote the following eyewitness account. He was taking pain pills, and he said he was dying. 1931. target_type: 'mix' Volleys of shotgun, rifle and pistol fire kept coming. Only two days later did the picture became clear. However, they have moved on with their life. This figure, though shocking, gave room for hope maybe the remaining hundreds of people of the colony had fled into the jungle and were saved. 'To me the ends justified the means,' he said. "I think he would be admitting in his own warped mind that he was not this great revolutionary he had tried to build himself up to be . Stephan Jones was born on 1 June 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He remarried three decades ago, and he and his wife Erin raised three sons with two now coaching basketball at the high school and college level. John was attending a San Francisco high school when he was allowed to join his best friends in Jonestown. Rebelling, they refused Jones' order to come back. Stephan Jones currently lives in Petaluma, CA; in the past Stephan has also lived in San Rafael CA and Novato CA. So in my view, even the good works and things he championed were in some way not as pure as folks want to think. I could still hear the groaning and crying of the targets. Jonestown: It was the bodies that photographers favored most. Some of them had started out with him in the earliest days in Indiana and moved with him to California. At 16, she was put on the Planning Commission where the meetings were a strange mix of church business, sex talk and adulation for Jones. Id rather just talk about what didnt work and hope that people can see that in their own lives. Which probably wasnt true. And I say, 'My name is Jones.' You used the word forgiveness, but I find love and compassion for him. Yeah often people do. Within minutes, the aide and her three children lay dead in a bloody bathroom, their throats slit. "I would have been a traitor to the greatest cause there ever was . Hundreds of corpses were lying on the ground in front of them. 'Little Jimmy' became part of their 'Rainbow Family' of white, black, Korean-American and Native American children. I want out of this.' And the temple was his life first in Indiana, later in California. I stopped and listened. Everyone was waiting for him to take himself out. He plays forward. 'The reality was we were folks who could be counted on to stand up,' he said. I made that last trip with him and he made me stay in Jonestown. Among the hundreds of corpses, only one was different; he had died from a bullet to the head. "This was when he started bragging about taking 16 people on in one day, and all that crap. The woman sang as they coupled, and when Stephan Jones' mother told the boy she knew about it, she also told him--it is this he remembers as the crescendo of the betrayal--that his father had even described the song. _taboola.push({ She gave her house to the Peoples Temple and they moved to San Francisco. Where the machine shop once stood, there was only rusty equipment. Temple attorneys Charles Garry and Mark Lane, along with Ryan, subdued the man. Dozens of Peoples Temple members in Guyana survived the mass suicides and murders of more than 900 because they had slipped out of Jonestown or happened to be away that day, The bodies of five people, including Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., are shown above on the airstrip at Port Kaittuma, Guyana, after an ambush by members of the Peoples Temple cult on November 18, 1978, John Cobb looks at names of family members on the Jonestown Memorial in Oakland, California. Joining him was an older black man who fingered something in his right pocket. Stephan Jones and some other team members believe they might have changed history if they were there. In California, he was steeped in temple life. I found relief in the woods and rivers and creeks, and I got away as often as I could, but there was always a low-level anxiety that I only really can identify now.. He called his church "Peoples Temple"--"Wings of Deliverance" had been tried earlier and discarded. Marceline and Jim had one biological child together, and Stephan Jones appears in Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre. Stephan Gandhi Jones, age 60s, lives in Petaluma, CA. That he was just this crazy zealot this entire time. 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