Former One Direction member Liam Payne was seen arguing with a woman about money just three hours before his death, a fellow guest at the CasaSur hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, told the Herald.

“I’ll give you US$20,000 dollars just because I can. I have US$55 million and I like to help people,” Payne kept repeating to a woman in the hotel lobby, according to Michael Fleischmann, a United States citizen who lives in Argentina but has been staying at the hotel with his mother, who is visiting him.

The prosecutor’s office said in a report that two women that were with Payne at the hotel before his death were called in to testify on Wednesday night. They had both left the building when he died. News reports state that both women argued with Payne at the hotel because he refused to pay them. 

Fleischmann didn’t realize it was Payne at first, but recognized him as the man he’d seen in the hotel reception when news of his death broke. He described the 31-year-old musician as “a man with an English accent who seemed to be causing a disturbance.”

Payne “seemed very upset, agitated, a little wild, walking around and pacing,” the man said. “He seemed very energized,” Fleischmann said. Payne was also yelling, saying he could help the woman, Michael’s mom, Toni Fleischmann, added. 

“We don’t know what they were doing before that, but she looked very uncomfortable and he kept repeating that information,” Michael said. The woman seemed to be a local, given she spoke Spanish and the hotel manager was translating for them, while also trying to stop the argument.

“It just looked like she was extremely uncomfortable with him, and a little apprehensive,” Toni Fleischmann said about the woman. The lobby was almost empty at that point. “It was just my son, me, Liam Payne, the woman and the staff. The manager was trying to politely intervene or calm him down. There was a feeling of anxiety in the area,” she said.

The argument was verbal, but the Fleischmanns feared that it could escalate. “The situation definitely felt very tense,” Michael said.

After that, the Fleischmanns went up to their room just as Payne got in an elevator. “He kind of pushed my arm out of the way. That’s the last I saw him,” Michael said. After that, he left the hotel with his mother and saw the woman that Payne had been arguing with, talking on the phone outside.

The argument happened at around 2 p.m. Hotel staff called the emergency services to report Payne was breaking things in his hotel room at 5 p.m., asking them to send someone because he was staying in a room with a balcony and they were worried that he might do something that would endanger his life. 

The head receptionist of the hotel had warned: “We have a guest who’s out of it because of drugs and alcohol. And when he’s conscious, he’s breaking everything in the room.”

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The circumstances of Payne’s death are still unclear: although authorities are investigating whether his death was a suicide, prosecutors are also investigating the possibility that he fell accidentally, possibly as a result of a full or partial loss of consciousness. There is currently no evidence that third parties were directly involved in his fall.

Hotel staff said in TV interviews on Wednesday that Payne had been with two women in his room, and that they had argued about him not wanting to pay them, although this has not been confirmed by local authorities.

Hotel CasaSur did not respond to requests for comment.

When Fleischmann and his mother got back to the hotel at 10:40 p.m., they saw TV cameras and dozens of Payne’s fans mourning him, lighting candles on the street.

“We were shocked that it was the person that we had seen,” Fleischmann said. “We were shocked that it was a famous person, that he had died, and that we had witnessed his final moments.”

When entering the hotel, the two saw a couple of police officers leaving, but there were no more officers inside and staff seemed to have resumed normal hotel operations, although there seemed to be more employees than normal. On Thursday morning, two police officers were inside the hotel when the Fleischmanns went to get breakfast, but they appeared calm, as did the staff.

Fleischmann was not able to see the internal patio where Payne fell because he is staying on the opposite side of the hotel, facing the street, where he could see fans still gathered on the sidewalk and TV cameras as of Thursday morning.