According to reports, Liam Payne died at the age of 31 after falling from a balcony and suffering serious injuries.
Liam Payne fell from the third floor of his hotel room at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, according to local officials, according to the Associated Press. The fall caused “extremely serious injuries,” Buenos Aires police said in a statement. Doctors confirmed he died at the scene.
Pablo Policicchio, a spokesman for the Buenos Aires Department of Security, told the news agency that the former One Direction member fell from his room’s balcony and said police were dispatched to the hotel following an emergency call about an “aggressive man who may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol”.
Responding officers heard a commotion and found Payne’s body in the hotel courtyard. Liam Payne reportedly fell 13-14m and “suffered serious injuries that resulted in instant death”.
“We arrived in time to try to save his life, but there was nothing we could do,” Alberto Crescenti, head of the state’s emergency health system, told Argentina’s Todo Noticias television channel. Crescenti added that authorities were investigating the circumstances surrounding Payne’s death and an autopsy was underway.
It is unclear whether Liam’s fall from the balcony was intentional or accidental.
Meanwhile, witnesses told TMZ that the incident happened just after 5pm local time and that the pop star had been acting erratically in the hotel lobby before. The former One Direction member reportedly smashed his laptop and had to be escorted back to his room.
Liam Payne, who shared a seven-year-old son with ex-girlfriend Cheryl Cole, has previously revealed that he hit “rock bottom” during his time in One Direction due to his drug and alcohol use.
“I was worried about how far my rock bottom would go. Where was my rock bottom? And you would never see it. I was so good at hiding it. No one would see it,” Payne said on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast in June 2021.
Payne also shared how alcohol abuse affected his mental health.
“There are a few pictures of me on the boat, and I was so swollen,” Liam recalls. “I call it drug and alcohol face. My face was 10 times bigger than it is now.”
“I didn’t like myself very much, and then I changed.”
Liam Payne said that because he and his former bandmates – Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik – rose to fame so quickly, they often had to stay in hotel rooms and use minibars. Payne said that while he was grateful to be part of the band, he didn’t always have “the freedom to choose and do things”.
