Thank you for the very clear response!
The sandbox is on a subdomain of the developer's website. ourSite.theirDevSite.com/sandbox/
Their robots.txt actually redirects to their main website (why? no idea).
But the developer should verify the subdomain sandbox site in GWT/BWT, then disallow everything with robots.txt (and stop redirecting it), then request the entire site to be removed. Anything I'm missing?