Liam Payne Death Probe Leads to Charges Against Five People, Including Alleged Friend
Argentinian authorities have now charged five people in the death of One Direction’s Liam Payne, including his alleged close friend and multiple hotel staffers, two and a half months after the singer fell to his death from the balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel room.
Rogelio “Roger” Nores has said he was close friends with Payne and was with him earlier on Oct. 16, the day that he died after falling from the third-floor balcony of Hotel Casa Sur in Buenos Aires, an upscale hotel in the city’s chic Palermo Soho neighborhood. He has not been charged with manslaughter in Payne’s death, according to Argentinian news outlets Clarín and Infobae.
Nores was identified by prosecutors as “the victim’s representative who accompanied Payne on this trip to Buenos Aires to obtain his U.S. visa again.” The criminal classification he faces is separate from the hotel staffers also hit with a negligent homicide charge. Initially, the prosecutor had requested Nores, a U.S. national, be charged with the more serious crime of abandonment of a person followed by death; that carries a sentence of five to 15 years in prison.
“Bringing Payne up to room 310 in that state, where he was staying, was creating a legally unacceptable risk to his life,” Judge Laura Bruniard said. Payne had alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in his system before his death, prosecutors said in November.
Nores denied any involvement in Payne’s death in a statement in November: “I never abandoned Liam, I went to his hotel three times that day and left 40 minutes before this happened. I could never have imagined something like this would happen,” he said. He has been ordered to remain in Argentina.
Hotel Casa Sur manager Gilda Martin and Esteban Grassi, the hotel’s head of reception, are also facing manslaughter charges. According to the judge overseeing the case, both had contributed to “creating a risk that resulted in Payne’s death.” Martin and Grassi, the judge declared, saw Payne being taken upstairs by three people while inebriated and knew there was a balcony in his room that was a source of risk for Payne.
“Payne’s consciousness was altered, and there was a balcony in the room. The proper thing to do was to leave him in a safe place and with company until a doctor arrived. The people responsible at the hotel that day were the manager GAM and the head of reception ERG,” the judge added.
Two other staff members, Braian Paiz and Ezequiel Pereyra, have been charged with supplying cocaine to Payne and remain in custody. This occurred twice in the days before his death — on Oct. 15 and 16.
Nores, Martin and Grassi were processed without preventive detention for negligent homicide, the prosecutor’s office said. The prosecution of the five defendants was overseen by Andrés Esteban Madrea, head of the National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office No. 14; according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office, Madrea had investigated the circumstances of Payne’s death from day one.
Lawyers for the defendants may now appeal that decision before a prosecutor decides to request a trial after considering all of the evidence presented in the case.
On Monday, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement that according to the forensic experts, it is likely that Payne fell unconscious after attempting to climb over the railing of the room’s balcony.
“I maintain that the person named tried to leave via the balcony of the place where he was left because the forensic experts noted that he did not lose his balance. This is how the fall occurred,” the magistrate said.
Judge Bruniard in the Criminal and Correctional Court Number 34 ruled on the decision to prosecute. The names of those facing charges in Payne’s death come after the announcement that three people had been charged, but their identities had not been revealed.
Payne was 31 at the time of his death, which shocked the music industry and his devoted fans. On the day of his death, a call was made to emergency services to respond to a hotel guest “who is overwhelmed by drugs and alcohol” and “destroying his room.” He attended his former One Direction bandmate Niall Horan’s concert in Argentina.
Doctors later determined that the cause of death was “polytrauma, internal and external hemorrhage.”
A message sent by THR to the prosecutor’s office in Buenos Aires on Monday was not immediately returned.
