Deshaun Barbee moves around this city like a man chased. He dodges the police, has used an alias, and once borrowed a relative's driver's license to hide his identity.
Barbee, 19, lives like this because of events that took place when he was underage: Two years ago, he was caught riding the commuter train without a ticket. A year earlier, at 16, police found him driving a car without insurance.
For both incidents, local police issued Barbee tickets with summonses to appear in court. But because he was poor and on his own—his mother had died, and he was living with his older sister—he said he didn't show up in St. Louis City Municipal Court to pay the tickets. The court issued a bench warrant. Now he's afraid that if police stop him again, he could go to jail.
Barbee said he felt marked as a criminal even before hitting adulthood. "I'm not talking about drug cases," he said. "I'm talking about simple tickets."
[For more of this story, written by Seth Freed Wessler and Lisa Riordan Seville, go to http://www.nbcnews.com/feature...sponsibility-n289566]
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