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Student Drug Informant Found With a Bullet in His Head and Rocks in His Backpack

poledriver

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Jul 21, 2005
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Student Drug Informant Found With a Bullet in His Head and Rocks in His Backpack

When police found Andrew Sadek selling $80 worth of pot, they pressured him into being a confidential informant and told him to go after ‘harder drugs.’ Then he turned up dead.

Student Drug Informant Found With a Bullet in His Head and Rocks in His Backpack
When police found Andrew Sadek selling $80 worth of pot, they pressured him into being a confidential informant and told him to go after ‘harder drugs.’ Then he turned up dead.
On Andrew Sadek’s 20th birthday, North Dakota police made him an offer: moonlight as a confidential informant and avoid rotting in prison.

It was November 2013, and Sadek had never been in trouble before. Months earlier, he’d sold a small amount of pot—$20 and $60 worth—to a narc at his school, the North Dakota State College of Science.
Sadek was in the crosshairs of a local task force, which searched his dorm room and found a plastic grinder with marijuana residue. A day later, he was in an interrogation room with Richland County sheriff’s deputy Jason Weber.

Weber warned the baby-faced student he was facing 40 years in prison and a $40,000 fine for peddling weed on campus.
“Obviously, you’re probably not going to get 40 years, but is it a good possibility you’re going to get prison time if you don’t help yourself out? Yeah, there is,” Weber said during the recorded interview. “That’s probably not a way to start off your young adult life and career, right?

“What I’m going to ask for you to do is do some buys for me… then depending upon how you do… a lot of this could go away,” Weber added.
A frightened Sadek swore not to tell a soul about the undercover ops. He never spoke to his parents or a lawyer. He was encouraged to ferret out dealers and heavier drugs on his own, footage of the interview shows. The video was released to local media last year under open-records requests.

Six months later, Sadek turned up dead. Authorities pulled his body, bound to a backpack full of rocks, from the Red River. There was a bullet hole in his head. Police tried to tell his parents, John and Tammy Sadek, he committed suicide, Tammy Sadek told The Daily Beast.

Two years later, and the Sadeks still have no answers about how their son died—but they believe he was murdered as a result of the informant gig.

Last week, the family filed a wrongful death suit against Richland County and Deputy Weber, who helmed the dangerous operation as part of the South East Multi-County Agency Narcotics Task Force, or SEMCA.
When reached by phone, Weber declined to comment. His attorney, who also represents Richland County, also refused to speak.
Tammy Sadek says she’s waited for details on her son’s undercover buys, and still hopes the same deputies who recruited him will nab his killer.

“That’s why we’re forced into this lawsuit. A lawsuit is not the North Dakota way. But this is our last grasp at hoping to get some answers,” Tammy Sadek told The Daily Beast.
“We’re not a sue-happy state. A man’s word means something here in North Dakota,” she added. “We trust that people are going to honor their word. We trust the police. It just didn’t happen in this case.”
The Sadeks have asked the FBI to take over the case, which is being probed by Minnesota and North Dakota authorities. Tammy Sadek is also working with a Republican state lawmaker on legislation to protect informants and reduce marijuana penalties in North Dakota.

Before Andrew Sadek died, he was attending the Wahpeton college on an electrician’s scholarship, weeks shy of graduating from a two-year program. He planned to return for a third year so he could become a master electrician.
Sadek was known for winning a state vocational skills competition. His mother said he was shy and giving, a hard worker who tended to his family’s cattle ranch and, with his father and late brother, helped build their home.
“He just loved working with his hands,” Tammy Sadek said. “He preferred to do that instead of being book smart. He wasn’t at the top of his class in high school, but he was the top of his class in the vocational tech center.”

Sadek was Tammy and John’s only living child. His brother, Nicholas, died at age 18 when a train struck his truck in 2005. With her family destroyed, Tammy Sadek is warning other parents that law enforcement is deploying collegiate informants.
“I think [Andrew] was trying to get his quota, and he went to the wrong person,” Tammy told The Daily Beast. “I firmly believe he didn’t do this to himself. There was no depression. No note. I’ve gone through everything.
“He had plans for that weekend [he went missing],” she added. “He had plans for his life.”



Cont -

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...t-in-his-head-and-rocks-in-his-backpack.html?
 
I remember reading about this phenomenon before...the police coercing relatively privileged people they nabbed during some piddly-shit drug bust into becoming CIs, and then subsequently these people getting into the world of hard drugs and "real criminals" (and, as a result, sometimes risking being seriously injured or killed).

Snitches are often looked upon as the lowest of the low (often with good reason...this guy would have never been in a position where some pig could get into his head if not for the fact that some "narc", as the article put it, snitched on him for selling 80 dollars worth of marijuana) but he didn't deserve to have his life end like it did. Any and all law enforcement who were involved in this whole sordid affair should be ashamed of themselves, and I hope his death haunts them for the rest of their careers...but I know that it probably wont.

I imagine that marijuana law in North Dakota is still appropriately backwards, reactionary and ignorant
 
Similar to the Rachel Hoffman story out of Florida.
 
Tammy Sadek says she’s waited for details on her son’s undercover buys, and still hopes the same deputies who recruited him will nab his killer.

There's a kind of sick irony there - the cops are imo almost as culpable for his death as whoever actually pulled the trigger.

Really tragic story all around.
 
The people most directly responsible for this poor young man's untimely death are the lying, piece-of-shit cops who were trying to fill their monthly drug bust quotas.

Police officers working in narcotics who attempt to 'turn' a bust into a C.I. to catch bigger fish know all too well about the potentially deadly implication associated with such a scumbag move.

The reality of the situation is that, by choosing to try and convince a young, terrified, gullible, lowest-of-the-low/occasional dealer of parts of a low risk plant into a bona fide snitch for the purpose of apprehending hardened wholesalers, mules, stashers, and so forth is, in my opinion, unethical; and it puts the individual at a dangerously high risk of being tortured and/or murdered; and based on the data available over the past 40 years (with consideration of applicable laws), benefits no one more so than the cops themselves.

And yet, knowing all this, it sure as hell seems like the cops involved couldn't care less about essentially marking a bright, educated, non-violent kid with a prosperous future ahead of him - who preferred Marijuana over other legal yet more dangerous drugs such as Ethyl Alcohol - for death. And for that reason, they should be held at least partly accountable for contributing to the untimely murder of this poor soul... ALL BECAUSE OF A FUCKING PLANT!!! ANOTHER FAMILY NEEDLESSLY RUINED THANKS TO YOU GREEDY PIGS.

Edit: Oh, and pardon me, I forgot that they also lied to his parents regarding how he died. And if that doesn't suggest or infer that they realized they fucked up badly, then I don't know what will. So, I hope the victim's parents receive some semblance of justice for their son's murder, but I wouldn't hold my breath, because the justice system in America has long been anything but just.
 
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Similar to the Rachel Hoffman story out of Florida.

Didn't the make a law as a result of her Racheals Law....which I read states that cops cannot promise reduced sentancing to coerce one into being a CI, not that narc detectives ever follow laws.

Nothing screams CI like a small time pot dealing middle class kid suddenly asking gang members for thousands worth of hard drugs and guns. I'm sure the career dealers can smell them coming a mile away....this is why I believe rachesl law requires "proper training" of CIs so that they sound like they are actual real dealers, not just potheaded kids
 
I hope the parents win a big enough lawsuit that the city is unable to continue funding it's narcotic task force
 
just terrible.
the police have far too much power - they abuse it regularly.
the war on drugs is insane and was really only designed to make money and hurt minorities and "hippies".
fuck all of this
 
I hope the parents win a big enough lawsuit that the city is unable to continue funding it's narcotic task force

Actually they wont stop funding the narcotics task force. They will stop funding the arts, community centers, schools, and so forth.
 
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