Sadek's family insists he was murdered, citing that the backpack that was attached to his body was filled with rocks and that neither a suicide note nor the weapon used in his death was ever found.

[3] At his mother's behest, the state investigated the police handling of his case but found no serious concerns, although SEMCA did make minor changes in its procedures afterwards.

[3] Sadek's parents filed a lawsuit over the case and campaigned for changes to state law that would reduce penalties for marijuana possession on college campuses and protect CIs, much like a similar statute in Florida passed after the 2008 murder of Rachel Hoffman.

[7] After graduating from Valley City High School, Sadek began attending North Dakota State College of Science (NDSCS) in Wahpeton in 2012, with the aim of becoming an electrical technician.

On two occasions, the buyer was another student working as a confidential informant (CI) for the South East Multi-County Agency Narcotics Task Force (SEMCA), a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement agency which provides policing services to three southeastern North Dakota counties (Ransom, Richland and Sargent), plus Wilkin County in neighboring Minnesota, focusing on drug enforcement.

[5] Based on these buys, in November, SEMCA performed a consent search on Sadek's dorm room, where they found an orange plastic grinder with marijuana residue.

[7] A review of security cameras at Nordgaard Hall captured an image of Sadek leaving the building after 2 a.m. on May 1, wearing jeans and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers hooded sweatshirt, and carrying a black backpack.

[11] Two months later, investigators from North Dakota and Minnesota released the autopsy report, stating that the cause of Sadek's death was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the head.

[6] She also criticized NDSCS campus police, who were in charge of investigating the circumstances of her son's disappearance and death, for not seriously exploring angles that suggested homicide instead.

[12] While Tammy conceded that a .22 caliber pistol was missing from the family home, she expressed doubt that her son would have chosen to kill himself with his college graduation only two weeks away.

[3] In December, Tammy revealed that when the family brought his car home from the NDSCS campus after his initial disappearance, they found the carpeting was completely wet, as well as several inches of water in the spare tire well in the trunk.

[14] In August 2014, Tammy Sadek called on North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to investigate SEMCA's handling of her son's work as a CI.

[1][17] In December 2015, the CBS News program 60 Minutes compared Sadek's case to that of another NDSCS student who had also been arrested by SEMCA for selling marijuana on campus.

[8] An undercover narcotics officer told 60 Minutes that legally he was not required to inform arrestees of their Sixth Amendment rights until after they were charged and about to be asked questions which might elicit self-incriminating answers.

The bill would lower the penalties for possessing marijuana on campus by making the offenses less severe, ending mandatory sentencing and increasing the amount that drug offenders must have to be charged with dealing.

[4] On the second anniversary of the discovery of Sadek's body, his parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Richland County and SEMCA officer Jason Weber.

[21] They alleged that the county failed to properly train and oversee Sadek for what they were asking him to do, and fraudulently deceived him by overrepresenting the likely severity of the punishment he would receive from a court if he did not cooperate.

O'Keeffe responded that those statements had been made as part of general warnings to other parents about the perils of letting their children serve as CIs, and that it was not the Sadeks' intent to affect the case.

[23] After a new trial date was set for April 2018, it was again delayed when Tatum O'Brien, another of the family's attorneys, asked that it be postponed since several organizations, including NDSCS and SEMCA, had not provided documents they had requested.

[25] The Sadeks had argued that the district court judge, Jay Schmitz, had evaluated their deceit claim improperly, applying the standards of fraud instead, which arise from contract law.

Crothers also found the Sadeks' argument that their timeline evidence of Andrew's work as a drug informant, voluminous as it was, was insufficient to establish that as a proximate cause of his death and would have required a jury to speculate.

"[25] : at 828–829 In 2022 the Sadeks filed another action in district court seeking post-judgement relief (essentially a request to relitigate the case), arguing that it had relied on bad-faith assertions by Weber in granting summary judgement two years earlier.