'The Dakota Entrapment Tapes': What is the SEMCA task force? How abuse of power led to Andrew Sadek's death
In 2008, 23-year-old Florida State University graduate Rachel Hoffman was murdered while acting as a police informant. The death led to the passing of the Rachel's Law by the state of Florida, which requires law enforcement agencies to provide special training for officers who recruit confidential informants, instruct informants that reduced sentences may not be provided in exchange for their work, and permit informants to request a lawyer if they want one.
Six years later, in June 2014, the body of missing North Dakota State College of Science student Andrew Sadek was found and could only be identified through dental records. Twenty-year-old Sadek had gone missing in the early hours of May 1 that year, nearly six months after the Southeast Multi-County Agency (SEMCA) task force roped in Sadek for selling $80 worth of cannabis.
While the offense would have most probably gotten him just probation and/or community service, SEMCA officer and Richland County deputy sheriff Jason Weber told Sadek that he would be facing 40 years in prison, and roped him into working as a confidential informant (CI). During this interrogation, Weber told him that it was best that Sadek keeps the meeting and his working as CI to himself and crucially, did not inform Sadek of his right to an attorney.
SEMCA's use of Sadek as a CI and his disappearance and death is the subject of the two-part docuseries, 'The Dakota Entrapment Tapes' on Sundance Now.
While the police ruled Sadek's death as a suicide, his family believes otherwise. Sadek was only a few weeks away from graduating, had a new girlfriend at the time, and had made plans for the week following his disappearance. The Sadek family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Richard County and Weber, however, a judge tossed the lawsuit in 2019 over lack of evidence of Sadek's death which was classified as "undetermined" as the police could not conclude whether Sadek shot himself of someone else shot him.
The Southeast Multi-County Agency (SEMCA) taskforce is a multi-jurisdictional agency that provides policing services to Richland, Ransom, and Sargent Counties in North Dakota and Wilkin County in Minnesota. The group does not maintain a website and public documentation is scarce.
In 2015, after Andrew's mother, Tammy Sadek requested North Dakota's Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to investigate SEMCA's handling of her son's work as a CI, it was found that while SEMCA had followed established law and procedure, it had to be put under the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) authority, which it was by the end of that year. Up until then, SEMCA had performed as its own entity, with its own board of directors, and its own oversight.
In 'The Dakota Entrapment Tapes', we learned that SEMCA was a money-driven organization as they received their funding from the federal government. To keep operating, they needed more money from the federal government, and to get that, they had to make more arrests. As a result, the task force began to target more low-level users on the campus and used them to go higher up in the levels of the drug-dealing scene in the area.
SEMCA is still operational and its officer Jason Weber is still working within the task force. Possibly due to the dismissal of the Sadeks' lawsuit, Weber has faced no repercussions for his handling of Andrew Sadek and to this day, works with other confidential informants.
'The Dakota Entrapment Tapes' airs on Sundance Now on Tuesday, October 27, at 3 am EST.