VANCOUVER, B.C - Robert Dziekanski's mother and her friend pleaded with airport staff and at least one immigration officer for help to find the man but received little assistance, a public inquiry into his death heard Wednesday.

Zofia Cisowski and her neighbour Rick Hutchinson waited for much of the day before finally leaving Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 13, 2007, hours before Dziekanski was stunned by an RCMP Taser and later died.

The would-be Polish immigrant had been at the airport all along, wandering around for hours before he was confronted by police officers.

Hutchinson told the inquiry he and Cisowski spoke with airport staff more than half a dozen times they were waiting for a man who didn't speak English, that they had told him the wrong meeting place and asking if there was any way to find him.

But Hutchinson said that in the eight hours they spent at the airport, several people told them they couldn't provide any information about Dziekanski.

An immigration officer even said that after so long, there was little chance Dziekanski would still be at the airport, he said.

"Disregarded, not important - that's the attitude I was getting from the people at the airport," said Hutchinson, who lives in the same building as Cisowski in Kamloops, B.C.

"I didn't feel that they were interested in communicating with me."

Hutchinson said that when he and Cisowski first arrived, he went to an information booth and asked where to meet international passengers.

He and Cisowski were directed to the international arrivals area, where they waited with no sign of Dziekanski. They each returned to the information booth several times but were told to keep waiting, Hutchinson said.

Frustrated after five hours of dealing with staff that they felt weren't helping, Hutchinson said they went to another booth but were told the same thing.

A woman at that booth eventually tried to page Dziekanski twice in English, but he was in a secure customs screening area at the time. That airport worker testified later Wednesday that the page wouldn't be heard in the customs area.

Finally, seven hours after arriving at the airport, Hutchinson went to an immigration office and used a telephone to speak with a border officer.

The woman on the phone told him that providing any information about Dziekanski would violate privacy laws and that he likely wasn't there anyway.

"She basically informed me that I had been waiting too long, that there's no possible way that that would take that long for anyone to get through there," Hutchinson said.

"'I can (tell) you in all certainty that there's no landed immigrant from Poland here in this place, so you might as well go home,"' he quoted the woman as saying.

Dejected, he and Cisowski drove back to Kamloops, where she found a message from officials asking her to return to the airport.

After his testimony, Hutchinson told reporters he did everything he could to help Cisowski find her son.

"When that lady from immigration said you might as well go home because he's not there, that's what I bought," he said.

"I thought they could have done something to get us in touch with that fellow."

Workers from the two booths - first tourist information and later a customer service desk - testified they told Hutchinson and Cisowski they couldn't access passenger information and instructed them to instead go to the immigration office.

But both workers also acknowledged they knew that immigration officials typically don't give out information about passengers.

Still, Janet Sullivan, the second to encounter Hutchinson and Cisowski, said she believed the immigration office could still help.

"I thought if he was still in immigration after all this time, obviously there was a problem and he didn't speak the language and I thought they would probably be able to help her if he was in there," she said.

The airport and the Canada Border Services Agency have been criticized for not finding a translator for Dziekanski to find out why he was in the airport for so long or, when he eventually became agitated and started throwing furniture, to learn why he was in distress.

It's also not clear how the immigration officer was able to conclude Dziekanski wasn't in the airport, even though he had already passed through his initial screening but hadn't yet gone through customs and immigration screening.