Congressman Leo Ryan was an inveterate reformer, critical of conditions in slums and prisons and an early opponent of Scientology.

David Isay’s excellent StoryCorps site, which allows people to share oral histories, has new audio from Erin Ryan, whose father, Congressman Leo Ryan, was assassinated during a 1978 fact-finding mission in Guyana as prelude to the Jonestown massacre. She was recorded in Washington D.C. in the days after the attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ life. An excerpt:

“The night before he went on the trip to Jonestown, he had had dinner at my apartment. I was going to college at Georgetown University, trying to teach myself how to cook, and it was just a chance to hang out with my dad. Dad had done a lot of adventurous things in hid life, and everything had always turned out well, so we didn’t talk a lot about the trip. You know, I think looking back if I had known more I might have been more concerned. I heard the news around eight or nine o’clock in the evening, and there was a flash news report on the television that said that a congressman has been shot and possibly killed…pretty much that was it. It was gut-wrenching to not know what was happening. I mean, I can still feel it to this day when I think about it. It was brutal, and we struggled then for a very long time. You know, my message to the families of the victims of this tragedy with Congresswoman Giffords and those who were killed…for me it’s been 32 years and it can still bring me to tears, but you can’t make that a defining moment of your life. I’ve always said to myself that I was lucky that he was my dad, and that I was lucky to have had him for the years that I had him…and that’s what you have to hold on to.”