**An excerpt from Justice: In Her Honour**
A few weeks before my thirteenth birthday, a news bulletin interrupted the Sunday late-morning music. It informed us that approximately nine hundred people were killed at The Peoples Temple – located in the Northwest district of Guyana, between Port Kaituma and Matthews Ridge.
Religious leader, Jim Jones, orchestrated the mass murder-suicide. This eccentric, egotistical apocalyptic leader, who was fully established in a new country, embraced a socialist /communist philosophy. When confronted with the truth of a failing ideology that had no more legitimacy than George Orwell’s allegorical portrayal of inequality in his book, ‘Animal Farm,’ he instigated the death of approximately 900 people. Jim Jones also killed himself in Guyana’s South American rainforest. His dream died undetermined and unfulfilled – illustrated by the abandonment of sound judgement for a bogus reality. Fortunately, a few souls at the Georgetown headquarters, about a five – or ten-minute walk from my home, were spared a premature death.
That was the first time I had heard of someone being murdered, moreover, so many souls in one day. Jim Jones, the tyrannical cult leader’s wife, Marceline Jones, along with congressional representative, Leo Joseph Ryan were among the dead. Death’s icy tentacles ominously exposed themselves. I had no idea they would soon reach my home. To understand the terror’s complexity, I must take you back to when my mother met her husband, who was my stepfather.