Guests who were staying at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Liam Payne fell to his death this week, are detailing the singer’s “disturbing” behaviour in his final hours.
A woman named Rebecca told told the Daily Mail “there was something a bit desperate about him” when she encountered Payne, 31, in the hotel lobby.
“I came into the hotel, and he was waiting by the elevator, and it was so clear he wanted someone to recognize him,” Rebecca, who did not share her last name, told the outlet.
“When the lift came, he suddenly said to us without any prompting, ‘Yes, I’m Liam!’ really drawing it out, and then said, ‘All right, come on, you lot, get in the elevator with me. I love a cuddle,’” she claimed.
Rebecca said that one of her friends was supposed to get Payne’s suite but that staffers at the hotel were “a little on edge” because he hadn’t vacated the room yet.
During the elevator ride, which Rebecca skipped, she said Payne started “fake-choking” a woman she believed he was with.
“Only lightly, but the others thought it was really disturbing,” she said.
When she was still in the lobby, Payne had returned with his laptop, which she said was on “its accessibility setting.”
“Each time he moved the mouse, hovering over something, the machine spoke out loud to say where the cursor was,” she recalled. “I assumed he was doing that for the attention, too. Then he opened his emails and saw one which obviously upset him. Suddenly he took the computer, shouted, ‘F*** this s***, mate!’ and started bashing the computer on the ground.”
Rebecca said his outburst left onlookers uneasy. “It’s a high-end hotel, and his behaviour was so out of place — people were just chilling,” she said.
She said she approached Payne and asked if he needed assistance. “I went over, asked, ‘Are you OK?’ But he just kind of grunted. Then he said, ‘I used to be in a boy band. That’s why I’m so f***ed up,’” she said. “There was a lot more swearing, and he took the laptop over and went to get back in the lift.”
Rebecca said “hotel staff were freaking out and watching him really nervously.”
“I could see one of them was on the phone to what I assumed was security or the police,” she recalled.
Another guest told PEOPLEthey heard “a lot of noise” in his room right before he fell, including “a really loud, violent scream.”
Around 4:30 p.m. local time, the guest said they saw hotel staff “going in and out” of Payne’s room and thought “construction” might have been going on.
Not long afterwards, they say they “heard a really loud, violent scream” followed by sirens.
By the time the patron returned to ground level the “whole street was full of cop cars.”
Newly released audio detailed a frantic scene in the moments leading up to Payne’s deadly plunge from the third floor of a hotel in Argentina.
On Thursday, the U,K, Sun, the Associated Press and Argentinian outlet La Nacion translated an emergency call made by the manager of the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires in which the person could be heard saying a guest was “overwhelmed with drugs and alcohol” and “putting his life at risk.”
“We have a guest who is (allegedly) high and drunk; and when he is conscious, he is destroying his room and we need you to send someone, please. We need you to send someone urgently because I don’t know if his life is in danger,” the manager named “Esteban” said.
“They must be in a room that has a balcony. And well, we’re a little bit worried he’ll do something, that he’ll put his life at risk,” he said.
Despite looking fine in a series of videos shared to his Snapchat on Wednesday, several witnesses echoed Rebecca’s comments telling TMZ that in the leadup to the emergency call the father of one had been “acting erratic” in the hotel lobby earlier in the afternoon.
By the time medical personnel arrived, Payne’s body was on the ground outside the hotel with La Nacion reporting that “a bottle of whiskey, a lighter and a cellphone” were also found at the scene.
Pablo Policicchio, the communications director for the Buenos Aires Security Ministry, said in a statement to The Associated Press that Payne “had jumped from the balcony of his room.”
Unverified photos taken of his alleged hotel room showed a chaotic scene with a smashed television and discarded foil and a white powder, which police will test to see if it is cocaine, La Nacion reported.
Buenos Aires police told the Associated Press that they found Payne’s room “in complete disarray” with broken objects and furniture. They found packs of clonazepam, a central nervous system depressant, energy supplements and over-the-counter medications strewn about his belongings. The Argentine public prosecutor said there also appeared to be alcohol and narcotics in the room.
According to the AP, an autopsy showed internal bleeding and 25 traumatic injuries to his skull, limbs and abdomen, consistent with a fall. It said those injuries alone were enough to cause his death.
Payne may have fallen into “a state of unconsciousness,” the AP reported, and may have been “going through some kind of substance abuse episode.”
As police aim to pull together a timeline of Payne’s final hours, they interviewed two women who were with the singer earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, a source told PEOPLE that Payne “was extremely overwhelmed by all of the legal issues … related to his ex-fiancee, Maya Henry.”
According to the Daily Mail, Payne was hit with a cease-and-desist order last week after he repeatedly tried to contact Henry.