Liam Payne, a former member of the boyband One Direction, has died after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, according to local police. Payne, who was 31, leaves behind his seven-year-old son, Bear.
Police said they discovered Payne’s body after emergency services responded to a call from staff at a hotel where the pop star was staying in the city’s trendy Palermo neighborhood.
Payne rocketed to global stardom as part of One Direction, the massively popular boyband that was created on the British version of the X Factor in 2010. The group, which included members Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik, announced an “indefinite hiatus” in 2016.
Staff at the hotel had requested urgent police assistance shortly before Payne’s death Wednesday, according to an emergency call obtained by CNN’s Argentine affiliate Todo Noticias.
“We have a guest who is overwhelmed with drugs and alcohol,” the hotel manager said on the call. “He breaks things up. He is tearing the whole room apart.”
The manager told the call operator that because Payne’s room had a balcony, “we’re a little afraid that he’ll do something.”
Payne first dazzled British audiences as a bright–eyed 14-year-old during his audition for The X Factor in 2008, singing Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”
“I should really be concentrating on my [school] work, but I just think about singing too much,” he said before his first audition. Payne, who grew up in Wolverhampton, a city in the English midlands near Birmingham, spoke then with a thick “Brummie” accent that would fade as his career progressed.
Judge Simon Cowell later cut Payne before that series’ live performances, telling him to focus on his studies and “come back in two years.”
In 2010, Payne, then 16, returned for his second audition. Later in the series, judge Nicole Scherzinger grouped Payne together with Styles, Tomlinson, Horan and Malik to form One Direction. The group came third in the competition and signed with Cowell’s record label, embarking on their first tour the following year that sold out in many of the 54 global venues.