Liam Payne’s fans were running in circles in Buenos Aires last October, hoping to catch a glimpse of the former One Direction star but unsure exactly where he was staying.
That changed when news broke that Payne had died after falling from a third-floor hotel balcony in a trendy part of the Argentine capital. Within minutes, they flocked to the scene. What had been a hunt for their idol quickly turned into a different mission: to create a place where fans could honor his life.
The sudden grief took shape in candles and flowers outside the CasaSur Palermo Hotel, soon becoming a coordinated effort to maintain an altar. For an entire year, pictures of Payne have endured, along with handwritten letters from his fans and balloon numbers counting the months since his death.
“We’re like Liam’s fairies,” said Valeria Riosa, a 46-year-old hairdresser who leads a community of hundreds of fans, mostly women and mainly from Latin America. It started as a WhatsApp group and turned into a TikTok account and Instagram page.
Riosa and others visit the memorial, which is wrapped around a tall tree near the hotel, several times a week to take care of it. They sometimes travel for hours on public transportation.
“Some people come for the events of monthly anniversaries, but we’re always here,” she said as other fans behind her carefully dusted laminated photos, arranged flowers and cleaned amulets.
Luana Soledad Bustamante, 26, leads another fan group that set up a memorial in the Buenos Aires cemetery where Payne’s body was prepared before being repatriated to England.
The shrine is at the back of a large graveyard about two miles from the hotel. There is a green bench surrounded by flowers and pinwheels, with a golden plaque featuring a One Direction quote. A mailbox nearby is filled with dozens of letters from fans.
Bustamante and a friend gathered donations from around the world to raise the $400 needed for the memorial. When it was inaugurated this year, fans from Turkey and Japan joined the livestream to hear a priest’s words and a speech by the organizers.
“We all cried,” she recalled. “It was very intimate.”
In 2010, Payne entered the reality show “The X Factor” and left as part of the five-member boy band One Direction. The group sold tens of millions of records before splitting in 2016, after which Payne and his bandmates pursued solo careers.
“Strip That Down,” his first single, rose the charts. “You know, I used to be in 1D, now I’m out, free,” Payne sang. “I just wanna have fun and get rowdy on Coke and Bacardi.”
Payne, whose son is 8 years old, was open about his struggles with addiction. Although he spent some months in rehab in the United States in 2023, he relapsed last year on a trip to Argentina that was in part to see his former bandmate Niall Horan perform.
On the afternoon of Oct. 16, 2024, Payne was seen inebriated in the hotel lobby. Employees took him upstairs and shortly afterward, he fell out of a window into an interior patio. A toxicology report revealed high levels of alcohol and cocaine, along with prescription antidepressants.
Five people were initially indicted in the case, but three were cleared of charges of negligence in May. A hotel employee and a local waiter are still accused of repeatedly supplying narcotics to Payne, 31, during his four-day stay at the hotel. If convicted, they face sentences of four to 15 years in prison.
A lawyer for the waiter, Braian Paiz, said his client was a victim of a “witch hunt,” describing him as a scapegoat because he was from a low-income background.
“The most powerful remain free,” said the lawyer, Fernando Madeo Facente.
Andrés Madrea, a prosecutor who led the case in its early stages, credits fans with helping to reconstruct the events leading to Payne’s death. In addition to traditional investigation methods, the authorities leaned on the insights that fans had gathered by monitoring Payne’s whereabouts in the city.
“Two universes merged,” he said.
Bustamante, one of the fans who reached out to Madrea, also organized events to honor Payne during those early days of shock. She helped put together an album of letters for the Payne family and hand-delivered it to the singer’s father when he visited to complete paperwork and give a statement to investigators.
Fans who lived far from Buenos Aires submitted their messages for the family via WhatsApp, and Bustamante and her friend would write them by hand meticulously.
“For many of the fans, coming to the memorials is still very painful,” Bustamante said. “But it gave me this friendship and shared moments.”
Aside from keeping the cemetery memorial clean and tidy, Bustamante now manages the letters placed in the mailbox. She hopes to send them to the Payne family soon with the help of the local British Embassy.
Bustamante also coordinates a network of fans across the world. Many of them have collected donations for children with cancer and gathered Christmas gifts for low-income communities, following the generosity they said they had learned from Payne.
At the hotel memorial, Patricia Bogataj, 62, said her spirits were raised by Payne’s music and his Instagram livestreams during the coronavirus pandemic, a time when she was working hard and struggling as a health-care worker.
“I found a group of support, they understand how I feel,” Bogataj said about the memorial brigade. Being an older One Direction fan has not been an issue. She proudly recalled attending a Harry Styles concert with her friend’s grandchildren, all in their 20s.
A few yards away, the youngest member of the team, Rufina Gómez, 10, helped her mother hold a large plastic cover to protect the memorial from the approaching rains of spring. Romina Gómez, 49, said she found comfort in just being near the place where Payne was last seen alive.
“I’ll come here forever, as long as I can,” she said. “It might sound crazy, but I know he’s here.”
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