Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, was found dead in a hotel courtyard in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday evening, according to CNN and La Nacion, both of which cited local police.
The singer died after an apparent fall from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room. Argentinian authorities told Good Morning America that Payne had been staying at the hotel CasaSur in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo.
He was 31.
Witnesses told TMZ that Payne had been acting erratically in the hotel lobby earlier on Wednesday. After smashing his laptop, he needed to be carried back to his room, the tabloid reported.
A spokesperson for the Security Ministry of Buenos Aires municipality told the Associated Press in a statement that Payne “had thrown himself from the balcony of his room.”
An official cause of death was not immediately confirmed, pending an autopsy and investigation.
Alberto Crescenti, the head of Bueno Aires’ public emergency medical services system, said in a short televised statement that Payne appeared to have suffered a fracture at the base of his skull after falling between 13 and 14 meters.
Crescenti declined to answer further questions about the incident, including as to whether the fall was deliberate or accidental.
Hours before news of his death broke, Payne had posted a flurry of photos and videos to his Snapchat Story. The posts were quickly deleted—it was unclear by whom—but not before they were archived and shared online by his followers.
At least one photo showed him posing with girlfriend Kate Cassidy, who accompanied him as he flew to Argentina last week to attend a concert by former bandmate Niall Horan.
Payne’s appearance at the Oct. 2 show, where he was filmed clapping and dancing along to the music, generated significant chatter online. In a Snapchat video posted ahead of his flight, Payne said he was going to Argentina to “say hello.”
“It’s been a while since me and Niall have spoken,” he said in an archived version of the clip. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. And I would like to square up a couple of things with the boy. No bad vibes or anything like that. But just, um, we need to talk.”
Payne and Horan formed One Direction alongside bandmates Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, and Louis Tomlinson in 2010. The five were put together by judge Simon Cowell after they auditioned separately for The X Factor.
Joining forces to compete as a group, the nascent boy band eventually finished in third. They were signed to Cowell’s entertainment label and shot to global stardom the following year after the release of their first single, “What Makes You Beautiful.”
Payne originally auditioned for the U.K. reality show in 2008, at the age of 14, singing a cover of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” that got him no further than the first round. Returning two years later, this time it was Payne’s version of Michael Bublé’s “Cry Me a River” that earned him a spot in One Direction.
“He wasn’t quite ready… two years ago, but I’d said to him then, ‘Come back, two years’ time, and you’re going to be a different person,” Cowell, who’d given Payne a standing ovation, told his fellow judges. “I got it right.”
One Direction grew into one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, with their first four albums—2011’s Up All Night, 2012’s Take Me Home, 2013’s Midnight Memories, and 2014’s Four—all debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
The band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016, several months after Malik departed the group to embark on a career as a solo artist. His former bandmates all eventually followed suit. Payne, for his part, debuted on his own in 2017 with “Strip That Down,” a barebones synth-bass track penned for him by Ed Sheeran.
“To be honest with you, I wasn’t going to do a solo venture. I was just going to go into songwriting and carry on and do that,” Payne told Billboard at the time. “But then I was like, ‘You’ve been trying to do this since you were 14 years old. You would be ridiculously stupid to turn down the option to have a deal.’ Coming out of the band, we had some pretty good opportunities around us. I had to do something.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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