A father living in the country illegally allegedly forged a judge’s signature on a fake court order just to snatch his own children back from child protective services in California.
Quick Take
- Federal authorities arrested Alan David Cadena, 43, and his girlfriend LayCee Shyann Sprouse, 34, on forgery charges tied to a custody dispute.
- Prosecutors say the pair filed a fake court order demanding their children be returned from child services.
- The real judge says she never signed the document, and it misspelled the word “childrens.”
- Investigators later found a second forged court paper with another judge’s fake signature and a counterfeit court seal.
A Fake Order Meant To Fool A Clerk
Federal prosecutors say Cadena and Sprouse wanted their children back from California child protective services. Instead of waiting on the legal process, they allegedly typed up a phony court order and slapped a forged judge’s signature on it. The plan hinged on a clerk simply accepting the paper as real and handing the children over without question.
It almost worked because the scheme relied on bureaucratic trust. Court clerks process mountains of paperwork every day, and a document that looks official often gets treated as official. That is exactly the vulnerability this case appears to expose, and it is the same vulnerability prosecutors elsewhere have flagged in similar forged-order schemes.
A Misspelled Word Undid The Whole Plan
The forged filing reportedly misspelled the word “childrens,” a detail prosecutors say helped tip off investigators that something was wrong. Surveillance footage from a Riverside social services building reportedly caught Cadena handing documents to a clerk on April 21, giving investigators a timestamp and a face to match against the paper trail. Cadena has denied creating the forgery himself.
The judge whose name appeared on the order later confirmed she never issued or signed it. That statement matters. A sitting judge publicly denying authorship of a document bearing her own signature is about as direct a rebuttal as exists in a forgery case, and it leaves little room for an innocent explanation involving clerical mix-up or mistaken identity.
A Second Forged Document Surfaces
Investigators say the trouble did not stop at one fake order. They later found another counterfeit court document, this one carrying the forged signature of a Riverside Superior Court judge along with a fake court seal, reportedly filed back in January. Two separate forged filings months apart suggest a pattern rather than a single desperate mistake, which is the kind of detail that tends to matter heavily once a case reaches sentencing.
Part Of A Broader, Troubling Trend
This case is not happening in a vacuum. Federal prosecutors in Indiana recently indicted a Colorado man, Joshua Culver, on five counts after accusing him of forging Chief Justice John Roberts’ signature and a fake Supreme Court seal onto a bogus order dismissing his own criminal case. That indictment, returned in July 2026, also accused Culver of posing as a Supreme Court “special master” and an intelligence agency official.
Federal law takes forged judicial signatures seriously for good reason. Statutes covering impersonation of federal officers and forgery of a judge’s signature exist because the entire court system runs on the assumption that a judge’s name on a document means a judge actually approved it. When that assumption breaks down, even briefly, it threatens the basic machinery that keeps custody hearings, criminal dismissals, and every other court action trustworthy.
An arrest is not a conviction, and Cadena’s denial deserves to be weighed alongside the prosecution’s evidence as this case moves forward. But the facts laid out so far, a real judge disavowing her own supposed signature, a misspelled word, surveillance video, and a second forged document, paint a picture that will be hard for any defense to explain away. Parents fighting to get their children back deserve sympathy for the underlying struggle. They do not get a pass for allegedly faking a federal judge’s signature to shortcut the process, and neither does anyone else who thinks a forged court seal is an easier path than the courtroom itself.
Sources:
legalaiinsights.com, abajournal.com, cyberscoop.com, immuniweb.com, npr.org
