Some of the church members complained to relatives in the US that Jones was drug addicted and was keeping them from leaving under threat of death. In November 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown, to determine if the reports of sexual slavery, death threats and other stories of mistreatment were true. After three days of interviewing the residents, Ryan’s party started to leave, taking along with them 20 People Temple members who also wanted to leave, and drove to the airstrip near Jonestown. As they were boarding the airplane, a truckload of Jones’ guards arrived and began shooting at the Ryan party. Killed were Congressman Ryan, a reporter from NBC News, two photographers, and one of the defectors. Several others ran into the jungle to escape the onslaught, while those remaining were taken back to Jonestown. At Jonestown, Jones called his congregation together, and ordered them to drink cyanide-laced Kool-aid. A total of 914 people died that day at Jonestown in a mass-suicide, including 276 children, although later investigation indicated a number of the people were murdered by shooting or by forced lethal injection. Jones himself was shot in the head while sitting in a deck chair. An autopsy on Jones revealed that he had a level of the barbiturate pentobarbital that would have killed a normal person, thus indicating that he had built up a long-term habit to using the drug. His son, Stephen Gandhi Jones, who was not present in Jonestown that day, would later confirm his father’s drug addiction. The US Army and the US Air Force mobilized graves registration teams to move the bodies back to the US for burial by their relatives, in a mass casualty operation.