American teacher and politician, a member of the Democratic Party, he served as the U.S. Representative from California’s 11th congressional district from 1973 until his assassination during the Jonestown massacre in 1978. Ryan was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983.
After the Watts riots of 1965, Ryan took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the area. In 1970, he launched an investigation into California prisons. While presiding as chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform, he used a pseudonym to enter Folsom State Prison as an inmate. During his time in Congress, Ryan traveled to Newfoundland to investigate the practice of seal hunting. He was also famous for vocal criticism of the lack of congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and co-authored the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, passed in 1974.
Ryan was shot and killed at an airstrip in Guyana on 18 November 1978 at age 53, as he and his party were attempting to leave. He had traveled to Guyana to investigate claims that people were being held against their will at the Peoples Temple Jonestown settlement. Shortly after the airstrip shootings, 909 members of the Jonestown settlement died in a mass suicide-murder by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. He was the second sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives to be assassinated in office, after James M. Hinds in 1868.
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