English singer and former member of best selling famous boy band One Direction, Liam Payne, has died after falling from the third floor of his hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The 31-year-old musician was staying at the CasaSur hotel in the Palermo district, according to local police.
In a statement from the Buenos Aires police, authorities confirmed that they were called to the hotel following reports of “an aggressive man who could be under the effects of drugs and alcohol.”
Emergency responders arrived and discovered Payne’s body in the hotel’s interior patio, where they pronounced him dead at the scene.
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.”
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“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.
One Direction remains one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, selling more than 70 million records worldwide before going on indefinite hiatus in 2016.
