Diacritical marks are truncated via Active Record

A string containing a diacritical mark (ex, "Erlösten"), is getting truncated to "Erl" when stored in the database via Active Record.

     $values['name'] = "Erlösten";
     $this->db->insert($this->_table, $values);

will store the 'name' value as "Erl".
The 'name' field in the database is set as varchar(100) with encoding set to  'UTF-8 Unicode'.

Is there a configuration setting I've overlooked?