The 17-year-old Nanticoke teen charged with attacking a man with a brick and stealing an ambulance last month was experiencing "bizarre hallucinations" as a result of a mental illness and needs to seek treatment under the juvenile court system, her attorneys argued in filings Thursday.

Destiny McNeil is charged as an adult with aggravated assault, theft, receiving stolen property, criminal trespass and fleeing police in connection with the Sept. 4 incident in which she allegedly hit a man on the back of the head with a brick in the 100 block of East State Street in Nanticoke before stealing a Trans-Med ambulance.

After leading police on a miles-long chase, McNeil was eventually forced off the road by a police cruiser in the foothills of Giants Despair in Laurel Run. In court filings Thursday, her attorneys, Cheryl A. Sobeski-Reedy and John Donovan, argue McNeil should be tried as a juvenile so she can get help with a diagnoses of psychosis that has her suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations.

During a hearing, mental health professionals will testify McNeil is developing the onset of paranoid schizophrenia, they wrote. "On the date prior to the incident in question, Sept. 3, 2015, Destiny was taken to the Wilkes-Barre General Hospital due to experiencing bizarre hallucinations, hearing voices and engaging in unsafe behaviors, such as darting in and out of traffic to escape the shadows that she saw chasing her," the lawyers wrote.

"At the hospital, unfortunately she was not admitted or held for observation and treatment or prescribed any medication, but was released." Transferring the case to the juvenile system will allow McNeil to get treatment that she "so desperately needs," the attorneys wrote.

They assert McNeil would be better suited in the company of other juveniles than in the presence of hardened criminals at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility, where she has been "harassed, taunted, made fun of, and belittled by the LCCF prison guards."

The lawyers also request her bail - which Luzerne County President Judge Richard Hughes reduced from $150,000 to $25,000 earlier this month - be further reduced or for her to be placed in a juvenile detention facility. They are seeking a status conference be held on an expedited basis.