At Jonestown, Guyana, cult leader Jim Jones ordered his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch, killing 918 people including 304 children, after members of his Peoples Temple assassinated Congressman Leo Ryan at a nearby airstrip. It remains the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until September 11, 2001.
Congressman Leo Ryan had flown to Guyana to investigate reports that Peoples Temple members were being held against their will. As his delegation prepared to leave, Temple gunmen opened fire at the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing Ryan and four others. Jones, sensing the end, assembled his followers in the compound's pavilion.
What followed was recorded on audiotape: Jones's calm, rambling voice urging "revolutionary suicide" while mothers were told to squirt poison into their children's throats with syringes. Armed guards stood at the perimeter to prevent anyone from fleeing into the jungle. Jones himself died from a gunshot wound, possibly self-inflicted.
The phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" entered the American lexicon afterward, though the drink used was actually a cheaper powdered substitute, Flavor Aid. Investigators later found the compound eerily intact, bodies arranged in rows, a testament to how thoroughly Jones had rehearsed this ending in "White Night" suicide drills for years.