Jonestown Victim Remains Found At Delaware Funeral Home
The cremated remains of nine victims from the infamous 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana have been discovered at a Delaware funeral home, Dover County officials announced Thursday.
The remains were discovered at the former Minus Funeral Home in Dover along with 29 containers of other remains. The majority of the cremated remains were marked and identified, spanning from deaths in the 1970s until the 1990's.
The Jonestown victim remains ended up at the Minus Funeral Home because when the mass suicide occurred in 1978, all of the 911 victims' remains were transported to the Dover Air Force Base, home to the U.S. military's largest mortuary.
"It was definitely a shock when we found out exactly what we had," Dover police spokesman Mark Hoffman told The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware. "Obviously it's an intriguing story and a tragic story, and to think this was found right here in our jurisdiction, about six blocks from the police department, makes it very compelling to us."
The Jonestown massacre took place after followers of Jim Jones, a charismatic preacher who founded the Peoples' Temple Agricultural Project, convinced his nearly 1,000 followers to accompany him to Guyana where they would live and form their own society. Jones then oversaw a mass suicide-murder of 911 victims by convincing them to drink a cyanide solution mixed with Kool-Aid at the small village they had established in Guyana.
The nine victims whose remains were recently discovered at the Delaware funeral home have reportedly been turned over to the Division of Forensic Science. Kimberly Chandler, a spokeswoman with the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security, told The News Journal that it remains undetermined why the nine remains were never collected by friends or family members.
"We don't know why they were unclaimed," she told the local media outlet. "What we intend to do is identify family members, reach out to them and make them aware that the remains are available to them."