A California biotech tycoon has been found guilty of orchestrating a murder-for-hire plot to kill a father of six and former business partner after their oil deal collapsed.
Serhat Gumrukcu, 42, of Los Angeles, faces a mandatory life sentence for the 2018 abduction and killing of Gregory Davis, who was taken from his Vermont home and found shot dead at the base of a snowbank, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
Gumrukcu, the founder of Enochian Biosciences, was found guilty of hatching the deadly plot after Davis — a father of six whose wife was pregnant with their seventh child — threatened to sue him over a soured oil deal.
Prosecutors said the biotech tycoon recruited his friend, Berk Eratay, 38, who then used a second intermediary, Aron Ethridge, 45, to hire hitman Jerry Banks, 37.
On Jan. 6, 2018, Banks, 37, arrived at Davis’ home in a vehicle fitted with flashing red and blue lights, posing as a Deputy US Marshal and telling the unsuspecting father of six he needed to come in for questioning.
Banks then abducted Davis from his Danville home and murdered him, prosecutors said.
Davis’s body was discovered in a snowbank a short distance from his home in Barnet, Vermont, on Jan. 7, 2018.
Following his murder, “investigators quickly discovered emails and messaging indicating the tension between Gumrukcu and Davis over the failed oil deal, resulting in Gumrukcu being interviewed twice by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” prosecutors said.
Investigators later discovered Gumrukcu had lied in each interview, but cellphone data, purchase records, bank documents, emails, and messages ultimately exposed him and his co-conspirators’ roles in Davis’ kidnapping and murder, according to the US Attorney’s Office.
Around 2017, Gumrukcu was brokering a multimillion-dollar biotech merger with Enochian Biosciences built around his purported HIV cure — a high-stakes deal that prosecutors said made silencing Davis all the more urgent.
Prosecutors said Davis’s threat to take legal action over their failed oil transaction could have jeopardized Gumrukcu’s bid to gain control of Enochian Biosciences.
Gumrukcu’s downfall came in May 2022, when he was arrested and taken into custody. He was convicted in April of murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and wire fraud.
“Serhat Gumrukcu tried to hide his role in the murder of Greg Davis by paying one man to pay another man to pay the hitman, who shot and killed Greg Davis on a January night in Vermont,” stated Acting United States Attorney Michael P. Drescher.
“Uncovering Gumrukcu’s responsibility for this murder involved years of determined investigation by the men and women of Vermont’s United States Attorney’s Office, working closely with the FBI and the Vermont State Police.”
Banks and Ethridge were arrested in April 2022. Eratay was arrested in May.
Banks was sentenced to 200 months in prison, followed by five years of supervised release, and Eratay received a sentence of 110 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Ethridge was sentenced to 140 months in prison followed by five years of supervised release.
Last month, Davis’s widow, Melissa, slammed Gumrukcu in court for shattering the lives of her and her seven children by killing her husband, Vtdigger reported.
“I stand here today not only as a widow, but as the mother of seven children whose lives were shattered the night Gregg was taken from us,” she told Gumrukcu during a Sept. 25 court appearance.
“You thought you could silence my husband, but your lies die here in this courtroom.”
During that same court appearance, Gumrukcu had his sentencing pushed to November.
He is staring down a mandatory life sentence.
