Standing at the edge of Toronto’s waterfront after a day of relentlessly searching for her son, Lori O’Quinn realized he wasn’t coming home alive.

Mason MacPhail, 16, disappeared on May 26, 2009, after he was allegedly thrown out of a packed all-ages concert for the rock group Disturbed at the Sound Academy on Polson Pier.

When the teen from Cavan, Ont., near Peterborough, didn’t come home, his family rushed to Toronto, ripping through dumpsters, banging on trailers and searching through the mud on Cherry Beach in the rain.

In the morning they posted flyers with Mason’s face: Missing.

When police pinged the teen’s cellphone it bounced back from a tower near the pier.

That’s when O’Quinn knew.

“I stopped and I looked over the water and I said, ‘Oh Mason, where are you?’ ” she said on Wednesday, sitting on a bench just steps from the water’s edge.

O’Quinn called her elderly father in Newfoundland: “Dad,” she told him, “I think he’s in the water.”

The next day, moments before a scheduled news conference, Toronto police told the family a body had been pulled from the shipping canal adjacent to the pier. They believed it was MacPhail’s.

An autopsy would show he had drowned, his opened flip cellphone still clutched in his left hand.

“It’s just been a living hell,” said O’Quinn. She wears a gold teardrop-shaped necklace filled with Mason’s ashes. “This is every mother’s nightmare.”

In a $1-million lawsuit launched in December 2010, his family is suing several defendants including the city, Polson Pier Entertainment Inc. and security services hired by concert organizer Live Nation for failing to ensure MacPhail was safe and for the emotional damage his death has caused.

The alleged negligence centres on operators and security at the venue failing to transfer MacPhail into the care of an adult, police or his friends, and of the city and related parties in failing to ensure the waterfront pier was safe for pedestrians.

“We need somebody to blame,” O’Quinn said. “Nobody’s taken the blame and this is somebody’s fault.”

All the defendants have denied any negligence.

In filed counterclaims, they allege MacPhail failed to ensure his own safety, leading to his own demise. They cite medication conditions as well as alcohol and drugs an autopsy found in his system.

They also claim O’Quinn failed to provide proper supervision or instruction for her son.

The lawsuit is still in its preliminary stages. None of the family’s allegations or counterclaims have been proven in court.

From surveillance video and a venue bartender who came forward after the incident, the family said it was clear MacPhail was in distress at the concert, his first in the big city.

Somewhere inside the crowded 3,200-capacity venue with fans pulsing to the heavy rock music, fists raised in the air, MacPhail got into trouble.

When he approached the bartender, she described him as sweating profusely and visibly distressed, according to the family’s lawyer, Justin Linden.

He reached across the bar and asked to hold her hand, she would later tell his family. He asked for her help.

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His family now believes he may have been having an asthma attack.

Video footage shows MacPhail bolting through the crowd before being caught by two guards and thrown out of the venue, the lawyer said.

Without keys to the van he and friends arrived in where his asthma medication was stored in a backpack, MacPhail allegedly asked to get back into the venue to find his friends, and was denied.

MacPhail allegedly travelled through a parking lot, operated by Polson Pier Entertainment Inc., where he fell into the cold water from an unfenced section of the pier.

Around 3 a.m., MacPhail’s family learned from his friends that the boys had been separated.

When they called Toronto police, they were asked to come into the city.

“I think my initial reaction was just panic,” said his sister, Melissa Fawcett. As police searched for her brother with some 50 officers, family and friends launched a search of their own. “You do everything in your power to bring him home.”

Dustin MacPhail, 21, said losing a brother he spent every day with has been surreal.

“We haven’t had that closure as a family,” he said.

It was O’Quinn who’d bought her son, the youngest of five, the ticket to the show. He’d counted down the days until the concert.

That evening, she got two texts from her son about arrangements to be picked up from a friend’s later that night after they made the drive home. That was the last she heard from him.

“He needed help and I wasn’t here to help him,” O’Quinn said, black mascara tears rolling off her cheeks.

But she can’t understand why no one else helped him — why security or staff didn’t call her or a cab, or let him get his friends instead of leaving a minor to his own defences.

“All they had to do was call,” O’Quinn said. “A phone call would have saved his life.”