Mikkel Aaland’s brother killed their father — so he wrote a book

Every other week, photographer-writer Mikkel Aaland drives from his North Beach home to Oakland to take his youngest brother, Hans, to lunch.

Hearing the voice of God, Hans used a T-shirt to smother his father in his bedroom in the family tract home in Livermore 12 years ago.

To figure it out, Aaland and his wife, Rebecca, pulled their two daughters out of school in San Francisco and spent a year in the 1893 house where his father grew up, on the Eidsel River, in small-town Ulefoss, Norway.

There is the mental illness aspect of it, the genetic aspect of it.

Hans also has schizophrenia, an illness that he was never properly diagnosed or treated for, Aaland says, and denied having.

Here is how The Chronicle described the event on Dec. 11, 2004, under the headline “Eccentric Accused of Killing His Father.”

Police say Aaland smothered his father, Kristian Aaland, early Saturday in the bedroom of the home he shared with his son and wife.

Hans Aaland, police said, told his mother what he had done, left a confession note full of biblical quotations and walked away from the home.

When the police came to investigate the scene, they called city inspectors, who red-tagged it, deeming it unfit for human occupancy.

There was illegal wiring everywhere, including in the bomb shelter inside a boxcar buried in the front yard.

Elizabeth Aaland cleared out her belongings and slunk away while still protecting her son Hans, and denying that he was mentally ill, even after killing his father.

When he moved his family out of the country, his plan was to take nature photos, keep a diary, and stitch the words and images together in a book he would call “A River in Norway.”

In an odd family, he is the even one, an Eagle Scout and an All-American breaststroker and captain of a Chico State swim team that won the NCAA Division II championship in 1973 and ’74.

[...] when he showed his beautiful photographs and journal to his wife, she asked the question that every reader would want to know.

By the end of his year in Norway, Aaland had followed enough tributaries to give him a bleeding ulcer that required emergency treatment as soon as the plane landed back in San Francisco.

“Dad struggled but then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’” Hans told his brother.

After driving him back to the mental hospital where Hans remains in custody, Mikkel gave his brother a box of Norwegian chocolates, which compelled Hans to say, “You know, if Dad wasn’t dead, you wouldn’t have Norway, and your daughters and Rebecca wouldn’t have it, either.”