Two Fridays ago Flagler County’s 911 dispatch center got several calls from people claiming to be witnesses of a stabbing. They claimed that the Chase Rollins Mott, 24, was the victim, and that he was running out of the woods on State Road 100 near Colbert Lane.
The final call to 911 was from Mott’s father, Robert Van Mott, who told the dispatcher that his son had been stabbed by “the stupid homeless people across the street” from Tomoka Marine, the business on State Road 100 that Robert Mott owns. His son was being rushed to the hospital, he told the dispatcher.
Fearing that a random assailant was at large, threatening the community, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office flooded the zone with deputies, detectives and other resources–the Sheriff’s Office would go to “the end of the earth” to solve the crime, Sheriff’s Cmdr. Brian Finn told Chase Mott at the AdventHealth South hospital’s emergency room within half an hour of the reported assault. He was not exaggerating.
In the first three hours of the investigation alone, one chief, three commanders, five sergeants, two corporals and three detectives and 10 deputies had been put on the case, along with units of Flagler County Fire Rescue, Flagler County FireFlight, the emergency helicopter, and the Real Time Crime Center, two technicians of the sheriff’s Crime Scene Investigation unit. By the time the investigation was done 10 days later, the detective bureau’s Major Case Unit alone had logged 29 hours, and eight 911 dispatchers had been involved.
And Chase Mott’s story was mostly a lie. No homeless person had attacked him. No homeless person had stabbed him. There was no random assailant. He had done it to himself and fabricated or dissimulated the rest, because there had, in fact, been an altercation with a man, but not as Mott described it.
There’s a trailer park near Tomoka Marine. Mott had been flying his drone over and into the trailer park. According to Zachary Saunders, a trailer park resident, his companion had repeatedly told him of a drone spying on the trailer hovering nearby. That day, Saunders saw the drone in his immediate vicinity outside his window and thought it was spying on him. He batted the drone down with a stick.
Mott appeared and started screaming at him, allegedly telling him to kill him because the drone was his life, and now it had crashed. “Saunders stated that Chase Mott then reached over in an apparent attempt to grab a hatchet which was on the ground,” the sheriff’s investigative report states. “Due to the bizarre way that Chase Mott had been acting, Zachary Saunders tackled him, so as to not allow him to grab the hatchet.” Mott then got up and sauntered off in an odd way, apparently from his injury, and started screaming, “He just stabbed me!”
Another resident of the trailer park witnessed the altercation, he told detectives. The witness said he heard Mott scream at Saunders to kill him, saw Saunders appear to push Mott, and Mott scream that he’d been stabbed. The witness said no such stabbing occurred.
The incident has left Sheriff’s Office personnel livid. You can tell from the arrest report filed by Sgt. George Hristakopoulos, who heads the Major Case Unit. He took the unusual step of listing the resources Mott wasted to make the point–every detective, every deputy, every supervisor, all the other resources, not including Volusia County, where Mott lives, and where he was eventually arrested and jailed–on a misdemeanor. All that resulted in a mere misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report.
But he is facing other charges from Volusia County. He was on probation on a 2022 burglary conviction there. His probation doesn’t end until 2027. The first two years were house arrest, and that period doesn’t end until June. So Mott, an Ormond Beach resident, was violating his house arrest. He was allowed to be at Tomoka Marine. That’s where he works. But his community control, or probation, conditions specify that he was to be confined to the work property at all times except for half an hour before and half an hour after work, for commuting time from and back to home.
At the AdventHealth emergency room shortly after the alleged stabbing, Mott told Finn that he had gone to a camp site near his workplace to fly a drone. His drone crashed. He was then assaulted by a supposed homeless man wielding an ax. The man swung at him, he told Finn, forcing him to defend himself. “That’s when he breaks the skin and he fucking stabs me,” Mott said in an interview Finn recorded. “I screamed in pain and I grabbed it out of his hand … and I just ran.”
As Finn told him how the Sheriff’s Office was going all out to find out who’d attacked him, Mott started prevaricating. “If you don’t want me to file a police report, I mean, cause I’m worried like, I’m not worried,” Mott said, “’cause the thing is, like, I’m on probation.” But he said he was telling the complete truth.
Almost 30 minutes into the interview, his story changed. The “homeless man” did not actually stab him. Rather, Mott fell on the ax. Then he said the alleged attacker wasn’t holding an ax, but a “big, long sword.” The he called it “a bowie knife.” Then he called it “just a weapon.” He’d just told Finn that he was alone with the alleged homeless man when it all happened. But that changed, too. He then said there was someone else. About 43 minutes into the interview, he changed his story again, saying the wound on his leg was, in fact, called by the other man, not by him falling on the ax.
Later, two detectives met with Mott to take another statement. Mott told them that when he went to retrieve his crashed drone, the homeless man threatened to kill him and pushed him, but that after that, it’s “a blur.”
The red flags were everywhere for the investigators. Hristakopoulos explained to Mott, his father and his brother that if the incident is not resolved, thousands of dollars would be spent to locate the alleged assailant. Mott then told him that “law enforcement does not need to continue looking for the suspect because the injury is something that he did to himself,” his arrest report states. “Chase Mott never truly clarifies this statement, because his brother and his father repeatedly intervene and appear to put words into his mouth. At one point, Chase Mott states that he needs to get his story straight before he says what actually occurred.”
Mott was treated and released. In a subsequent interview with detectives at his house on April 24, Mott said he wanted to prosecute the alleged assailant. But in the next 48 hours detectives spoke with the trailer park residents, concluding that Mott had made it all up while saying nothing of the drone hovering near the resident’s window.
