Andrew Sadek, a student at the North Dakota State College of Science, disappeared early last summer in Wahpeton, N.D., and his body was found in the Red River just over the border in nearby Breckenridge, Minnesota.
An investigation by the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation detailed how he had been working as an informant for the Southeast Multi-County Agency Drug Task Force (SEMCA) as part of a deal to reduce charges against him.
SEMCA officers had searched his dorm room back in 2013 as part of anti-drug efforts on the campus and after Sadek had bought drugs from another informant. Officers found marijuana and drug paraphernalia, enough that it would have been a felony with up to 20 years in jail. Sadek began cooperating with SEMCA officials, buying and selling to local drug dealers as an informant.
He had done several deals between November 2013 and January 2014, but not enough to erase the charges against him before he stopped communicating with SEMCA, which then referred the charges to a county prosecutor.
Prosecutors charged him with two felonies and a misdemeanor last May, around the same time he disappeared.
Sadek went missing in mid-May; his body was found in June with a gunshot wound to the head. Sadek’s mother believes he was murdered and had been bullied into cooperating with SEMCA. An investigation has not substantiated those charges.
A review of SEMCA’s actions found no wrongdoing on its part, and while SEMCA officials acknowledged that confidential informants sometimes work in dangerous situations, they couldn’t recall the last time any informant in the area had faced violence or ended up dead in a river with a bullet thru the head. Anti-drug agents, a SEMCA spokesman said, “bend over backwards” to protect their confidential informants. Even though investigators found nothing to link Sadek’s work as an informant to his death, a review board recommended that SEMCA add a supervisor and an additional agent to any operation involving a confidential informant.
