Chanel Chandler hopes the passage of a bill pending in the state Legislature will help give the family and guardians of mental health patients notification to possibly avoid the fatal tragedy that happened on Kauai to her nephew and a neighbor.

State Senate Bill 122, which would require certain notifications to families and guardians of such patients, is scheduled for a hearing at 10 a.m. today in conference room 229.

One day after his release from the psychiatric ward at a Kauai hospital in 2011, 21-year-old Shendon Chandler Taniguchi stabbed his grandfather at the elder’s Waimea home and attacked three neighbors, killing one of them, on Dec. 2, 2011. He was fatally shot by a police officer.

Chandler said without notification to the family, who had committed her nephew to the hospital, Family Court held a hearing about his involuntary hospitalization and decided to release him.

“If my family members were notified of the hearing, they would have attended the hearing and supported the need for Shendon’s continued hospitalization, ultimately preventing this horrific incident,” she said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Family Court officials and state officials did not notify the family about the court hearing or Taniguchi’s release from the psychiatric ward, she said.

Chandler said the family received a call from a nurse at the hospital, saying Taniguchi had been released.

She said her family began looking for him and found him wandering in the streets of Lihue and took him back to his grandfather’s home.

Chandler said if relatives had been called to testify at the court hearing, the judge would have heard that Taniguchi was forgetting to take his medication at home and was becoming harmful to himself.

An autopsy showed Taniguchi had only trace amounts of pills used to treat his psychiatric problem in his system, indicating he had not recently taken his medication.