Fred Phelps’s homophobic Westboro Church lost two high-profile members this week: his granddaughters Megan Phelps-Roper and her younger sister Grace. 

In the video interview below, Nate Phelps, Fred Phelps’s son, tells Xtra about the night of his 18th birthday and his own flight to freedom.

 

“I just stood there at the bottom of the stairs, and I watched the minute hand climb to midnight and I let out a yell,” he says. “I took off running out the back of the house and that was it.”

 

In the interview, taped in 2010, Phelps talks about how he kept in touch with his nieces and nephews.

 

He told them that he felt that “at some point this is going to come down on you like a pile of bricks, and when it does, I’m there as a resource.”

 

In an online post, the Phelps-Roper sisters say they are focusing on finding a “better way to live.”