"A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time."

To remove .parentlock files you can run the following command in the Terminal:

rm -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/.parentlock

(It's not in your profile)

However as said before, removing a .parentlock file won't help fix a stuck Firefox process.

Firefox writes two lockfiles, if they are not deleted during shutdown you have to remove them manually. They are called lock and .parentlock and located in the profile folder.

MozillaZine has an article on how to do that on the Mac.

EDIT: On OS X only .parentlock exists, so it should be enough if you delete that file. The file will have 0 KB size, so you can delete it with no worry.

This kills all Firefox processes on Linux:

pgrep firefox | xargs kill -9