A hotel guest has shared their experience of seeing Liam Payne in the lobby before his tragic fall from a third-floor balcony.
On Wednesday, October 16, police in Argentina were called to the CasaSur hotel in Buenos Aires after reports of a guest being ‘drunk with drugs and alcohol.’ Upon arrival, they found Payne in the hotel courtyard after his fall.
The former One Direction member passed away from ‘internal and external’ bleeding, as noted by Alberto Crescenti, the head of the state emergency medical system, who stated Payne had suffered ‘injuries that were incompatible with life.’
Just hours before the incident, Payne had been active on Snapchat. A fellow guest at the CasaSur has now described the singer’s final hours.
Speaking to ITV News, Brett Watson from Chicago recounted several interactions with Payne during their stay at the hotel.
He said: “So we’re here with a couple of other guests in the hotel and we were in the lobby just waiting for some people to arrive and that’s when we had multiple encounters with Liam.
“Multiple times [Liam] had come down to the lobby, was causing a disturbance, kept being escorted back up to his room.”
Watson mentioned an ‘incident’ where Payne appeared ‘very frustrated’ and was ‘smashing his laptop in the lobby’.
The guest further detailed: “The final time he came back down, he actually passed out in the lobby of the hotel, started, looked like [he was] convulsing a little bit and had to be physically taken back up to his room.
“And that was about five minutes before the eventual incident that happened.”
Earlier, Watson had captured a photo of Payne on a sofa in the hotel’s lobby, observing his laptop.
Present in the vicinity when Payne died, Watson witnessed and ‘heard the aftermath’ of the event as it took place.
Reflecting on his thoughts at the time, he said: “It didn’t seem real. You almost had to pinch yourself to understand and process what you were seeing, but it just was an out-of-body experience, surreal.”
Watson sensed a ‘suspicion’ that the individual who had fallen was Payne due to ‘the condition he was in earlier’.
Following the singer’s death, tributes have been pouring in, with his former One Direction bandmates expressing they would ‘miss him terribly’.