“A mistake ignored and uncorrected becomes a crime”
This case narrative deconstructs a decade-long child support enforcement action by the states of Colorado and South Dakota against Gerald Hershfeldt, revealing a child support apparatus built not on a valid court order, but on a documented administrative failure from June 2015. At the center of this protracted legal conflict is Mr. Hershfeldt's core allegation: the entire enforcement apparatus has been predicated on a court order that does not legally exist. This investigation reveals the foundational dispute over the original order's validity, the subsequent jurisdictional chaos that violated federal interstate enforcement law, the severe financial and personal consequences of the punitive actions, and the ongoing legal battle to have the entire obligation declared void ab initio—from the beginning.
https://youtu.be/pzXZ3xQowZ0?si=t1_78PSy1NuUfOg-
For ten years, Mr. Hershfeldt was subjected to relentless enforcement, including persistent wage garnishments and multiple driver's license suspensions. These actions resulted in an alleged debt and over payment exceeding $116,000, contributing to a period of documented homelessness and catastrophic damage to his financial stability. This document deconstructs the chronological sequence of events, agency communications, and court filings that define a complex legal dispute born from a single, critical entry in a 2015 court record.
2.0 The Foundation of the Dispute: The 2015 Dissolution and Contradictory Court Records
The entire legal conflict hinges on the events of June 2015, when the foundational court documents in the dissolution of marriage were created. An analysis of these documents is critical to understanding the petitioner's central claim that no valid, enforceable child support order was ever legally entered, rendering a decade of state enforcement actions fundamentally unlawful.
The timeline of events in Larimer County case 2015DR229 reveals a critical contradiction in the official court record:
“UNABLE TO ENTER SUPPORT ORDERS AS WE ARE MISSING SSN FOR CHILDREN; REQUESTED OF PARTIES IN COURT ON 6/9/15 /TPH"
According to the petitioner, this entry is the "smoking gun" of the case. The legal significance is profound: a decree that fails to specify a dollar amount, combined with a subsequent documented failure by the court to formally enter the order, means no enforceable obligation ever came into legal existence. The enforcement actions were thus void from their inception—meaning they were a legal nullity from the start, not merely incorrect. This fundamental ambiguity in the court record became the basis for a decade of aggressive, multi-state enforcement actions.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5c5fL-HLnug&feature=shared
The Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) is the controlling federal law designed to prevent jurisdictional conflict in child support cases. Its "one-order" principle establishes that only one state may have Continuing, Exclusive Jurisdiction (CEJ) to enforce or modify an order at any given time. As Mr. Hershfeldt has always been a resident of Colorado—the state where the original decree was issued—Colorado was the sole state with the legal authority to manage the case. Under CEJ, South Dakota's only legal recourse was to request that Colorado enforce the order. Evidence from agency communications reveals this legal framework was deliberately circumvented in favor of an illegal parallel enforcement scheme.