A DeLand man was sentenced to 45 years in prison for murdering a restaurant manager that he met through a dating application in 2021.
Michael Harris, 22, was sentenced by Judge Elizabeth Blackburn on Thursday, June 22, to spend 45 years in Florida prison for the murder of Bobby Gene Scott.
The sentence closes a case that dates back to January of 2021, when Harris arranged to meet Scott and beat him to death.
According to court records, Harris began communicating with Scott through Scruff, an online dating app for homosexual men. The two arranged to meet on Sunday, January 17, 2021 for a sexual encounter.
Scott, who was the manager of Caribbean Jack’s in Daytona Beach at the time, left the home that he shared with his husband that Sunday morning and never returned.
In the days that followed, an investigation into Scott’s disappearance was opened by his husband, who said he hadn’t heard from Scott and was concerned for his wellbeing.
Scott’s husband, whom he had been married to for a decade, told police that the couple had an open relationship and that, at times, they would meet up with other sexual partners. The husband told police that it was unusual for Scott to not respond to texts for long periods of time.
Scott’s cell phone was eventually recovered in a parking lot in DeLand. When police tracked his vehicle using license plate reading technology, they found that it was in the possession of Harris.
During an interview with police, Harris indicated that he and Scott had met up for a sexual encounter. Harris told police that the two had driven around DeLand and Orlando, before Scott met up with an individual to purchase meth.
While investigating the hits on license plate readers throughout the tri-county area, detectives determined that Harris had lied to police about the whereabouts the vehicle. In fact, the vehicle had never left Volusia County.
Police conducted forensic examinations of Scott’s phone and vehicle and found that he had been communicating with Harris in the minutes leading up to his disappearance. Multiple blood stains were found in various parts of the vehicle, including a stain that contained a finger print.
That finger print, along with several others in the car, was later determined to belong to Harris. The blood stains were tested and came back positive for a DNA match with Scott.
At the time of his arrest in 2021, Harris was taken into custody on a preponderance of evidence, but Scott’s body had not yet been found. Scott’s body was eventually found in a wooded area in DeLand. Authorities later determined that Scott had been brutally beaten and died from blunt force trauma to the head.