When Jerry was 14, the family moved to St. Louis to better their lives. Jerry’s dad got a job in a factory. The family climbed into the lower rungs of the middle class. Sadly, Jerry was not destined to stay there.

The story of how a person ends up on the streets is usually long and complicated. Jerry’s story fits that pattern. He’s had some jobs, and some long-term relationships with women, but a combination of bad luck and bad choices eventually left him homeless.

By 2011, he was destitute. He slept in abandoned buildings. Sometimes he slept behind the makeshift Greyhound bus station at 13th and Cass. He ate at various soup kitchens.

He did not fit the profile of a college student.

But he was. Unbeknownst to Jerry, he was enrolled at Columbia College in Columbia, Mo. He was paying for his classes with federal loans.

He did not know any of this until last winter, when dunning letters began to show up at his mother’s house on Goodfellow Boulevard. The letters came from Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc. The letters carried a U.S. Department of Education logo. The letters said he owed more than $4,300.

By then, Jerry was in the process of turning his life around. He was getting help at St. Patrick Center. He had quit drinking. He was sleeping in shelters. He even got a job as a bell-ringer for the Salvation Army during the holiday season.

The dunning letters kept arriving at his mother’s house.

Truth is, Jerry was not terribly concerned about his credit. He is off the grid. But he showed the letters to the people at St. Patrick Center. Ann Rotermund, the center’s senior director of mental health programs, called Gerald Ortbals, an attorney at Bryan Cave. Ortbals often does pro bono work for the center and its clients. Ortbals began a correspondence with Great Lakes. He explained that Jerry had not signed up for any loans and was a victim of identity theft. A fraud and identity theft specialist from Great Lakes sent back a “Required Documents Checklist.”

The document checklist was not compiled with a homeless man in mind. In addition to a detailed police report about the theft, he was to provide a “minimum of two (2) signature samples on separate documents, other than documents associated with the making of this loan, from within one (1) year before the loan’s disbursement. Signatures must be dated.”

Also, a “minimum of two (2) documents showing proof of your residence from within one (1) year of the loan’s disbursement.”

How do you prove you were sleeping behind the bus station? Where do you get two signature samples? And for that matter, how did somebody steal his identity?

If anybody can straighten this out, it will be Ortbals. Still, the veteran attorney is frustrated. “If they had required half this documentation before giving somebody the loan, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Ortbals said.

According to the federal loan application that Ortbals has received, the government didn’t require much of anything — not even a signature. Just a name, a Social Security number, an address and a couple of references.

I tried to find the references. They appear to be phony. Neither address exists. For that matter, the address for Jerry doesn’t exist, either.

How could this happen? Federal loans go directly to the schools. I called Great Lakes, the Department of Education in Washington and Columbia College. Citing confidentiality concerns, none of the parties involved in the loan would discuss the specifics of the case.

In general, though, a student loan recipient can get money for living expenses as well as tuition. So the school receives the entire amount of the loan and then rebates to the student everything but tuition and fees.

I called Columbia College to see if I could learn how Jerry did. Maybe he made the dean’s list. We can only release that information to the student, a young man in the records department said.

Rotermund and Kelly Peach, the senior director of communications for St. Patrick Center, helped Jerry fax a notarized request for his academic records to Columbia College.

It turns out he flunked four classes, including Introduction to Criminal Justice. He was placed on academic probation in December 2011 and suspended in March 2012.