page_title: Jackie Speier
section_title: Jonestown shooting
hierarchical_section_title: Jackie Speier / Jonestown shooting
caption_attribution_description: English: Image caption at source website, United States House of Representatives:Representative Leo Ryan of California was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest experession of national appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions.
context_page_description: Karen Lorraine Jacqueline Speier is an American politician who currently serves as a U.S. Representative for California's 14th congressional district, serving in Congress since 2008. She is a member of the Democratic Party. The district, numbered as the 12th District from 2008 to 2013, includes the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and the southwest quarter of San Francisco. She represents much of the territory that had been represented by her political mentor, Leo Ryan. In 1978, while working as his aide, Speier survived five gunshot wounds she received when Ryan was assassinated during the Jonestown massacre.
  Speier was a member of the California State Senate, representing parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties. On April 8, 2008, she won the special election for the vacated United States House of Representatives seat of the late Congressman Tom Lantos.
  A Caltrain Express locomotive is named in her honor.
context_section_description: Speier entered politics by serving as a congressional staffer for Congressman Leo Ryan. Speier was part of his November 1978 fact-finding mission organized to investigate allegations of human-rights abuses by Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple followers, almost all of whom were American citizens who had moved to Jonestown, Guyana, with Jones in 1977 and 1978.
  Several Peoples Temple members ambushed the investigative team and others boarding the plane to leave Jonestown on November 18. Five people died, including Congressman Ryan. While trying to shield herself from rifle and shotgun fire behind small airplane wheels with other team members, Speier was shot five times and waited 22 hours before help arrived. That same day, over 900 remaining members of the Peoples Temple died in Jonestown and Georgetown in a mass murder-suicide.
caption: Congressman Leo Ryan
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