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He started on the homeless side.

It was 2014 or so. Dates are fuzzy when you’re living on the street. Bedford is 31. He’s a Navy veteran who served in the second Gulf War. When he returned to St. Louis, his hometown, he lived with family for a while. He met a woman and got married. They had a daughter. He had a series of jobs but got laid off more than once. The demons from combat messed with his head.

His wife left him. He lived in his grandmother’s house in North County for a spell, followed by a stay at the Salvation Army shelter on Page Avenue.

Eventually, he navigated downtown, where the abundance of bridges offer dry respite from the elements, especially near the riverfront.

He wasn’t far from where he grew up.

“C-Block is what we called it,� Bedford says. It was the closest of the Cochran Gardens public housing towers to Patrick Henry Elementary School on the city’s near north side. Those towers have since come tumbling down, sort of like Bedford’s life.

For the past couple of years, he’s been living in the veterans’ residence side of the Salvation Army building, and he’s been battling with the state of Missouri.

Bedford is $2,800 behind in child support for his daughter. He was on the streets when the divorce case started and months behind before he received notice he owed the money, he says. By then, the state had already suspended his driver’s license and charged him with a misdemeanor. He lives on disability payments now and can’t afford to get caught up.

And that, Stephanie Lummus says, is a travesty.

Lummus, a Navy veteran herself, is an attorney with . Many of her clients are just like Bedford — poor people, often homeless veterans, who get behind on child support and then have their own poverty aggravated by the state when they get charged with crimes and have their driver’s licenses suspended. Both actions are counterintuitive, she says, making it less likely that child support will actually be paid, because the men and women slapped with those penalties lose jobs and income, and even have a more difficult time getting to see their children.

For seven years, Lummus has been representing homeless veterans in the court system, and she sees the same thing over and over again.

“These suspensions rob noncustodial parents of their ability to see their children and participate in their lives,� she says. “I’ve been responsible for putting the pieces back together after Iraq war veterans come home with PTSD and are unable to cope. They lose their jobs, lose their families, and then their homes. Finally they’re sleeping in their cars. Then they lose their license for failure to pay child support.�

Now she’s doing something about it.

On Monday, , a legal nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., is expected to file a first-of-its-kind class action federal lawsuit against the state of Missouri, with Bedford as one of two lead plaintiffs, seeking to end the suspension of driver’s licenses of indigent parents who are behind in child support payments. Lummus and her organization are co-counsel on the lawsuit.

Bedford is one of tens of thousands of Missourians, in cities and rural areas, who often face the same dilemma caused by this scheme, which attorney Phil Telfeyan of Equal Justice Under the Law says is unconstitutional.

has some sort of similar driver’s license suspension program for falling behind child support, Telfeyan says, but “Missouri is one of the worst states for this problem. There is nothing in the state law that takes ability to pay into account. ... These aren’t people who have no respect for the law, but it starts a cycle of poverty. It’s a completely irrational consequence.�

The lawsuit bears a resemblance to a federal lawsuit in which a judge ruled last year that the state could no longer suspend driver’s licenses for people who were behind in court costs. It is part of a trend in criminal justice reform that has numerous national legal nonprofits attacking criminal justice reform by ending schemes that punish people living in poverty unfairly and often without due process.

Last spring, Lummus got a call from a client who was a homeless vet. He had battled past PTSD, he had a job and housing. But he wanted to kill himself.

“He had worked his way up from sleeping in the loading docks of the Globe building to having a decent wage and a roof over his head. His license was going to be suspended and half of his pay had been taken for kids who were now in their forties,� she says. “He was also going to get evicted because he didn’t have the money to pay his subsidized portion of the rent. He had worked so hard and it wasn’t good enough, so what was the point anymore?�

Bedford has those days, where he raises his hands to the gray St. Louis sky and wonders if he’s ever going to escape the cycle that keeps him down.

“I was trapped,� he says, when the state took away his ability to drive and charged him as a criminal for what is essentially a crime of poverty. “I couldn’t get out. It was impossible for me to win.�

His path to victory begins at the federal courthouse due south of the public housing projects he once called home.