The former One Direction star died after falling from a third-storey balcony
A guest staying at the same hotel where Liam Payne fell from a third-floor balcony has spoken out about seeing the singer in the lobby prior to his death.
Police in Argentina responded to calls of a guest ‘drunk with drugs and alcohol’ at the CasaSur hotel in Buenos Aires on Wednesday (October 16), and found Payne in the courtyard of the hotel after he fell from his balcony.
The former One Direction star suffered ‘injuries that were incompatible with life’, according to the head of the state emergency medical system, Alberto Crescenti, and was confirmed to have died from ‘internal and external’ bleeding.
Payne posted updates to his Snapchat story just hours before his death, and now another guest at the CasaSur has spoken out about the singer’s final moments.
In an interview with ITV News, Brett Watson, from Chicago, described having ‘multiple encounters’ with Payne as they stayed in the same 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 went on to claim there was an ‘incident’ in which Payne had become ‘very frustrated’ and was ‘smashing his laptop in the lobby’.
The guest continued: “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.”
Watson had taken an image earlier in the day which showed Payne lying on a sofa in the hotel’s lobby, looking at his laptop.
Watson was still in the area when Payne passed away and both saw and ‘heard the aftermath’ of the incident as it unfolded.
Recalling what was going through his mind, 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 remembered having a ‘suspicion’ that the person who had fallen was Payne due to ‘the condition he was in earlier’.
Tributes have been flooding in for the singer in the wake of his death, with his former One Direction bandmates saying they would ‘miss him terribly’.