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The first defendant in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme to admit his involvement avoided prison because of his early and extensive cooperation with investigators. 

After the FBI raided the Feeding Our Future offices and two dozen other locations in early 2022, Bekam A. Merdassa was the first co-conspirator to come forward. 

“Nobody came in earlier than Mr. Merdassa, nobody,” defense attorney Joseph Dixon told U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel during his client’s sentencing hearing on Monday. 

Merdassa, 43, was among the first three people to 

 less than a month after federal prosecutors 

Merdassa, an aerospace engineer, admitted that he enrolled his nonprofit Youth Inventors Lab with Feeding Our Future as a phony food distribution site after government regulators blocked for-profit restaurants from participating because of fraud concerns. 

“The irony is that you were drawn in because the rules changed to prevent fraud,” Brasel said. “At this juncture, the scheme needed you.”

Over the course of seven months during the pandemic, Merdassa and several of his co-defendants falsely claimed to have served 1.5 million meals to children and stole more than $3 million from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs. 

“$3 million in fraud is an enormous amount of fraud,” Brasel said. “It’s only in comparison with the overall scheme that it looks small.”

Federal prosecutors have said the scheme that centered on Feeding Our Future and included the separate nonprofit Partners in Quality Care cost taxpayers around $300 million. 

The government ultimately charged 79 people. Merdassa was among 57 defendants who pleaded guilty. Jurors at separate trials in 2024 and 2025 convicted seven others, including Feeding Our Future founder 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Murphy said that Merdassa played a key role in getting other defendants to cooperate. 

“He confirmed the government’s theory of the case and [that the fraud scheme] was as big as the government believed,” Murphy said. 

Murphy, who’d sought a two-year prison sentence for Merdassa, added that he provided the government with key details about the fraud, including that Feeding Our Future “staged food distribution in order to gin up evidence” in a 2020 racial discrimination lawsuit that Bock had filed against the Minnesota Department of Education in which she alleged that the department had failed to approve dozens of meal sites operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali American community. The following year, a Ramsey County judge held MDE 

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel said that she struggled with whether to send Merdassa to prison or give him a probationary sentence. Brasel said that if he would have come forward sooner to stop the scheme, he "could have been a whistleblower instead of a cooperator."

Brasel said Merdassa’s cooperation ultimately warranted two years of probation, but that she "wouldn’t expect this sentence to be repeated" for other defendants. Brasel also ordered Merdassa to repay the $343,086 that he personally pocketed. Merdassa has already repaid around $56,000.

Merdassa was the 11th defendant to be sentenced in the case. The only other person Brasel sentenced to probation was Khadar J. Adan, a Minneapolis restaurant owner who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. 

 so far, 28 years, to Abdiaziz Farah. Farah, the owner of a small Shakopee restaurant, was a key player in the scheme. Bock could face a similar prison term when she faces sentencing on May 21. 

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A key cooperator in the $300M Feeding Our Future fraud scheme is avoiding prison after helping investigators build cases against dozens of defendants.

Feeding Our Future defendant avoids prison after early cooperation

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