Just hours after One Direction alum Liam Payne died on Wednesday, October 16 after a fall from his CasaSur Palermo hotel room, fans began gathering outside the Buenos Aires hotel to pay their respects.
In an impromptu vigil, fans lit candles, sang One Direction songs and cried as police continued their investigation into the 31-year-old singer’s unexpected death. Per police sources in Buenos Aires, Payne dropped from his third-floor balcony after police arrived at the hotel in response to an “aggressive man who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”
On Thursday morning, fans outside the hotel admitted to being in a state of shock or struggling to accept what happened.
“A lot of people feel and say, ‘no, I can’t believe it,’ but I just believed it,” fan Milagros Ortiz, 23, told Us Weekly. “I felt it, because he had been dealing with a lot of things, his own depression, addiction problems… sometimes you don’t have enough control.”
Another fan, 18-year-old Tiziana, brought a letter she wrote to leave at the site.
“I want to leave a few words,” she said. “What you feel. Or what you need to feel. The years we spent together.”
Zaira Bravo, who lives in Peru but visiting Argentina as a tourist, knew beforehand that Payne was in town and even came to the hotel to meet him earlier in the week. Returning to the site after his death, Bravo, 23, said she was heartbroken.
“It’s something I can’t explain, I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’m still in shock. The inner girl that I have inside, the teenager who lived the One Direction era, for me, is very affected.”
She added of her encounter with Payne days earlier, “He always showed himself very kind and respectful with the fans. We came to see him. He always had a moment for us, to take pictures with us, [sign] some autographs.”
As reality began to set in, fans like Jazmin Fernandez began to look back at how they learned the news and struggled to put it into perspective.
“I was with a friend yesterday afternoon and I started getting messages from my friends asking me if I was okay,” Fernandez, 19, said. “One of my friends had called me and I didn’t answer until read the news. I couldn’t believe it, it didn’t seem real. And then when I started to investigate and see everything on Twitter, I couldn’t believe it. [One Direction] was everything, it was part of my childhood, so I’m very sad.”
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With reporting by Luciana Arias in Buenos Aires. Follow her on Instagram here.
