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 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 the day of 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 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.
Hotel Casa Sur manager Gilda Martin and Esteban Grassimanslaughter, a hotel employee, are also facing manslaughter charges. Two other staff members, Braian Paiz and Ezequiel Pereyra, have been charged with supplying drugs.
Judge Laura 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.”
Doctors later determined that the cause of death was “polytrauma, internal and external hemorrhage.”
A message sent to the Buenos Aires prosecutor’s office on Monday was not immediately returned.
More to come.