One of my reporter friends at the Sacramento station was Mike Prokes, a quiet and intense guy who grew up in California’s fertile Central Valley. We often went skiing together at nearby Lake Tahoe.
Mike was the Modesto Bureau Chief and he did many stories about disputes between the mostly immigrant farm workers and the growers who produced fruits and vegetables for the whole country.
Mike often became personally involved in stories and after covering a service at the Peoples Temple in San Francisco he told us that he was quitting his reporting job and joining the group. He said the Church’s leader Jim Jones, a charismatic leader and former communist, “was on to something that’s really important.”
Further, Mike said he was donating his life savings of $7,000 to the church. We tried to talk him out of it, offered to hold themoney for him, but he said no thanks.
Five years later, most of the 900 followers of the Peoples Temple died by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch during a mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. In addition, Jones’ followers murdered Congressman Leo Ryan and two NBC News journalists who had come to Jonestown to investigate the cult.
For a couple of days, this tragedy was the biggest story in the world. Mike was not among the group that took their own lives. Instead, he was given a suitcase that reportedly contained $700,000 of the Temple’s money and told to take it to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana.
On their way through the jungle, Prokes and several others were arrested by Guyana police and never delivered the money to the Russians.
Four months later, Mike was back in California, he called a press conference at a motel room in Modesto. I did not attend it, but reporters say Mike excused
himself and went into the bathroom. They claim a faucet was turned on to cover sounds, then a shot rang out. Mike had fired a bullet into his head with a Smith
and Wesson .38 revolver.
He left a note which said in part:
“Don’t accept anyone’s analysis or hypothesis that this was the result of despondency over Jonestown. I could live and cope with despondency.
“If my death doesn’t prompt another look at what brought about the end of Jonestown, then life wasn’t worth living anyway.”