Editor's Note: The tragedy of Jonestown — the remote commune in Guyana where over 900 members of the Peoples Temple died in a mass murder-suicide in Nov. 18, 1978 — remains one of history’s most chilling cult-related events. PEOPLE first ran this story in 2018, and now revisit it to explore one young survivor’s desperate escape from a nightmare that few lived to tell.

Decades have passed since that afternoon Tracy Parks knelt on the rain-soaked, muddy airstrip in Guyana, cradling her mother’s lifeless body in her hands, shaking her in a desperate attempt to wake her up.

But for Parks, it feels like it happened just yesterday.

The explosion of gunfire had stopped, but all around her lay bullet-ridden bodies — some dead, others bleeding and moaning. “Get in the jungle,” her father Jerry s

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