The Last Escape From Jonestown’s Final Day

I. THE RUNWAY OF DEATH

The first gunshot cracked the air like a lightning bolt. Then another. Then a roar of bullets that swallowed every scream on that remote Guyanese airstrip—seven thousand miles from California, and a lifetime away from anything that resembled safety.

Twelve-year-old Tracy Parks fell to her knees in the mud, her hands trembling violently as they wrapped around the still-warm body of her mother. Rain soaked her hair, mixed with the mud, mixed with her tears. She shook her mother hard, harder, desperate enough to ignore the gunfire and chaos erupting around her.

“Mom… wake up… please…”

But her mother would never move again.

Her father, Jerry, his voice cracked with helplessness and panic.
“Get in the jungle! RUN!”

Tracy turned, saw her older sister Brenda sprinting toward the treeline, and without thinking, without breathing, she ran too—into the mouth of the rainforest, into the dark, into the unknown.

She would not learn the truth until much later.
Her mother was one of the first victims of Jonestown’s final hours, but far from the last.

What Tracy saw on that runway was only the beginning of one of the most horrifying mass deaths in modern history.

And somehow—miraculously—she escaped it.

II. BEFORE THE BULLETS: A FAMILY TRAPPED INSIDE A DREAM TURNED NIGHTMARE

Decades later, Tracy still remembers the sermons.
Jim Jones, with his sunglasses and slurred speeches.
His promises of paradise.
His threats of enemies everywhere.
His insistence that only he could save them.

Tracy’s family joined the Peoples Temple for reasons many Americans would understand: hope, community, belonging, purpose. The Temple fed the hungry, healed the lonely, clothed the poor—until the day it didn’t.

Until everything became fear.

By 1978, Jonestown was no utopia.
It was a prison in the middle of the rainforest.

And Tracy already sensed it.

“Even as a kid,” she recalled, “everything felt wrong. Everyone was tired, scared, hungry. No one smiled anymore.”

Her parents knew it too.
They were planning their escape.

But someone in Jonestown found out.

And in Jim Jones’s world, betrayal meant death.

III. THE FINAL TRIP: WHY THE PARKS FAMILY WAS AT THE AIRSTRIP

Congressman Leo Ryan’s arrival in Jonestown had ignited panic behind Jones’s sunglasses. Families whispered, wrote notes, begged for rescue. The Parks family was among those preparing to leave with Ryan’s delegation.

They were too visible.
Too outspoken.
Too desperate.

So when they boarded the trucks that would take them to Port Kaituma airstrip, Jim Jones already had a plan.

A violent one.

Tracy remembered the tension on the truck ride.
Her mother’s hand squeezing hers.
The guards watching every movement.
Her father whispering:

“Don’t speak. Don’t look back. Just keep your eyes forward.”

By the time the plane was loading passengers, the assassins were already aiming.

IV. THE AMBUSH

It happened fast.

A tractor-trailer roared toward the plane.
Men jumped out—armed with rifles.
Bullets exploded across the runway.

People fell instantly.
Others crawled, screaming.
Parents tried to shield children.
Children tried to wake their parents.

Tracy’s mother was shot in the first volley.

“RUN!” her father screamed again.

That single word probably saved her life.

She turned and saw Brenda already sprinting. She followed—the mud grabbing her shoes, branches tearing her arms, her breath screaming out of her chest—straight into the rainforest.

Behind her, the firing continued.
Ryan was dead.
Reporters were dead.
Temple defectors were dead.

And back at Jonestown, a different horror was beginning.

V. THREE DAYS IN THE JUNGLE

The rainforest swallowed them whole.

Tracy and Brenda stumbled through poisonous insects, twisting roots, and absolute darkness. They had no food. No water. No sense of direction. Fevers hit. Hallucinations. Weakness. Terry cloth pajamas soaked in sweat and rain.

They didn’t know their father was still alive.

They didn’t know Jonestown was already dead.

They didn’t know 304 children—some younger than Tracy—had already swallowed cyanide or had it forced into their mouths.

All they knew was this:
If they stopped walking, they would die too.

On the third day, sunburned, delirious, half-aware of their own footsteps, they emerged on the other side of the jungle—straight into the arms of rescuers.

They didn’t understand the relief on the rescuers’ faces.

They didn’t understand why medics cried when they saw them.

They didn’t understand, not yet, how many people were gone.

VI. THE NEWS THAT BROKE HER

Tracy woke in a hospital, barely conscious.
Her brother was there.

He spoke gently.
Slowly.
Cautiously.

“Tracy… there’s something I need to tell you.”

She closed her eyes.
She already knew her mother was gone.

But she wasn’t prepared for the rest.

“No one is alive,” her brother said, fighting tears. “They’re all gone.”

Her father survived the runway.
But many of her relatives did not.

The number hit her like a blow:

918 dead.

The largest mass murder-suicide in modern American history.

And the entire world was suddenly looking at the twelve-year-old girl who outran it.

VII. WHAT SHE SAW—AND WHAT SHE DIDN’T SEE

For decades, documentaries, books, and investigators asked Tracy the same question:

“What was Jonestown really like?”

Her answers were always steady, unwavering:

“This wasn’t suicide.
This was murder.”

She remembered the drills.
The threats.
The punishments.
The “White Nights” where Jones ordered rehearsals of fake mass suicide to test loyalty.

She remembered the fear.
The drugged guards.
The way parents were told their children would suffer without Jonestown.

She remembered the hopelessness that settled over the commune like fog.

And most of all—
She remembered the sound of Jones’s voice.

Droning through the loudspeakers.
Day after day.
Night after night.

“What we lived through wasn’t faith,” she said. “It was control.”

But the world didn’t understand—not right away.
Many still don’t.

VIII. THE WEIGHT OF SURVIVAL

Tracy built a life.
Finished school.
Had children of her own.
Became a daycare owner.

But trauma doesn’t vanish.
It settles in your bones.

She still dreams of the jungle.
Still hears gunfire sometimes.
Still sees her mother’s face on the runway.

And every November 18, the memories return with brutal clarity.

She survived something almost no one else did.
And survival, she says, can be its own burden.

“I lived when so many didn’t,” she told PEOPLE.
“I think about that every day.”

IX. THE LEGACY SHE CARRIES FOR THE WORLD

Tracy speaks to students now.
To families.
To counselors.
To survivors of other tragedies.

She tells them something that took her decades to understand:

“You can escape the place.
But escaping the memories…
That’s the real journey.”

Her story remains one of the most haunting eyewitness accounts of Jonestown.

Not because she saw everything—
but because she saw just enough to carry the truth for those who never made it home.

X. THE GIRL WHO RAN — AND LIVED

History will always remember Jonestown for the horrifying number:

918 dead.

But Tracy Parks wants people to remember something else:

The families who tried to flee.
The children who never had a choice.
The parents who believed they were saving their children, not dooming them.

And the girl who ran into the jungle and became a symbol of the miracle that too few received.

She is the proof the world needed:
Not everyone drank the poison willingly.
Not everyone believed Jim Jones.
Not everyone accepted death.

Some fought.
Some resisted.
Some ran.

And one twelve-year-old girl lived to tell the story the dead could not.