Ari Vuotila, 39, was headed home to South Orange on Tuesday, Jan. 27, after dropping off a friend he had spent the day teaching to snowboard at Mountain Creek. While driving through the intersection of Parsonage Hill Road and Long Hill Drive in Millburn, his car was struck by a 17-year-old driver, and he was killed almost instantly.

Nearly four months later, his mother, Viola, grieves for her only son while receiving constant visits from his local friends—largely a mix of high school classmates (he graduated from Columbia High School in 1988 and was captain of the fencing team) and foreign nationals living in South Orange.

They eagerly track the progress of the investigation and check in with the detective assigned, but a case against the 17-old-year Millburn driver—whose name hasn’t been released—hasn’t yet made it to the grand jury.

And, little by little, Vuotila’s mother gives away his things, including his extensive collection of classic rock records. Earlier this month, she hosted a party in her Scotland Avenue home in which friends could take his belongings. Various articles of clothing, skis, a wet suit and a cap from his time serving in the Finnish army are still laid out in the dining room.

Friends remember Vuotila as an adventurer who loved to debate and plan parties, and who worked as a snowboard instructor, a boat captain and even a cowboy during a post-high school stint in Wyoming. He was a Finnish citizen who moved to New Jersey at age 3 and lived as an adult in San Francisco and Burlington, VT, where his ashes were buried. Burlington was his home base until four years ago, when he returned to South Orange to care for his ailing father, Aarno, who died in the summer of 2007.

Viola Vuotila—a former actress and comedian now in her 70s—has lunch nearly every day at home with Hannah Roberts, who met Ari in 1998 after coming to South Orange from England originally to work as an au pair. Roberts had a weekly ritual with Ari, who would pick her up after work on Thursdays to watch “Survivor.”

Roberts was one of those tasked with informing Vuotila’s friends of his death and said the outpouring from local places he frequented—including Bunny’s; the Village Smoke Shop; the Public Library, where he frequently took his wheelchair-bound father; and the Reservation, where he typically took the family dogs on two daily walks—was overwhelming.

“You can walk in the Res and bump into people, and they ask about him,” said Roberts, who added that there’s been discussion of creating a memorial trail in his name.

Close friends remember Vuotila for his creativity— which extended to photography, shaping surfboards and even, briefly, to hairdressing—and his generosity. His high school friend Alex Giordano met him in art class at CHS and often visited him in Burlington in the late ‘90s. He recalled once waking up after a night of partying, discovering that the engine of his van was dead and being at his wits’ end, since he had little money.

But, when Vuotila woke up, he brushed his teeth and got to work. “He spent all day with me in the junkyard, picking out pieces to make my engine run,” Giordano said.

Also memorable was Vuotila’s irrepressible sense of fun. Roberts recalls an occasion when she visited him in San Francisco and he jumped out of a boat after spotting a tour group on an island and swam over to have a beer with them and then back. Another friend, Jesse Spector, also a CHS grad who met Vuotila in the early ‘90s, recalls visiting him in Vermont and watching him take a rope swing up a tree, jumping, flipping backwards in the air, and then sticking the landing.

“That’s when I was like, ‘Who the hell is this person?’” he said.

“He was an incredibly physical person,” said Giordano, who added that Vuotila’s vitality made his death all the more shocking. “What he could do physically would astonish you.”

While Vuotila missed Burlington and spoke of ultimately wanting to buy a house in Portugal and marry his girlfriend who lived in Munich—they met while she was an au pair in South Orange—he was devoted to caring for his parents and managing their house.

“He wouldn’t have had anyone else do it,” said Roberts.

For Viola Vuotila, Tuesdays are the most difficult, since Ari died on a Tuesday. She remembers Jan. 27 as the longest night of her life, when she visited St. Barnabas and tried to remove the sheet from his body.

“I said, ‘Ari, get up, let’s go home,’ and Hannah said, ‘He’s not coming,’” she said.

While she still begins every day thinking her son is at home only to be devastated by the realization that he’s gone, she takes solace from the presence of his friends.

“They’re like brothers and sisters, and they’re my friends now,” she said.