Antonio,
Thank you! I found this code on the PHP Manual link you provided and it fixed the problem.
/* change character set to utf8 */
if (!mysqli_set_charset($dbc, "utf8")) {
printf("Error loading character set utf8: %s\n", mysqli_error($dbc));
} else {
printf("Current character set: %s\n", mysqli_character_set_name($dbc));
}