Sandra Paiz lets out a gasp and her eyes immediately pool with tears. She puts a hand to her mouth in shock and with the other picks up a mobile phone. Her son, Braian Paiz, is calling from an Argentine jail cell where the former waiter has languished for nine months accused of selling drugs to the late popstar Liam Payne two days before his death.
‘I love you, my boy,’ Sandra says, wiping away the tears: ‘I will never leave you behind.’
When the Daily Mail visited Sandra Paiz in her two-room home outside Buenos Aires earlier this week, there was no indication that her son might call.
Braian’s phone time in prison is strictly limited and his conversations are closely monitored by prison authorities. And yet, in the remarkable brief exchange between him and his mother, there was a sobering reminder that Liam Payne’s death in Buenos Aires last year has had a devastating effect not only on those directly involved in the tragedy, but on their loving families too.
‘I’m calmer now,’ Braian revealed to the Daily Mail over the phone after speaking with his mother, explaining he had been moved to a new prison. ‘It’s very different in this place than where I was before. The conditions at the previous facility were terrible.
‘We didn’t even have running water, and the mattresses were very damp. I had a bad cold and cough for several weeks without medical attention. During winter, we bathed almost the entire time with cold water.’
‘And I was in a really bad place anyhow. I couldn’t stop overthinking, I felt terrible.
The news of Liam’s death hit me hard. But now, I’m focusing a lot on my freedom and on getting out.’
Sandra Paiz receives a video call from her son Braian, who is being held in an Argentine prison accused of selling drugs to late popstar Liam Payne
Also at home with Sandra is her youngest daughter Nicole, 19
Suddenly Braian stopped talking. There seemed to be a commotion around him with prison officers jangling keys and rattling chains. Finally, it quietened again and Braian revealed that officers had come in to adjust a security camera so as to see – via the CCTV – who it was he was talking to.
It’s a sobering reminder of Braian’s new life, one of constant supervision, restraint and denial.
Before he had to ring off, I had a chance to ask Braian one more question. Does he regret meeting his idol Liam Payne?
‘I’ve suffered so much psychological damage due to all this and the social condemnation, and of course I’m worried now I might be in prison for many years…’ Braian paused. ‘But I don’t regret meeting Liam. I was a fan.’
There is a clang of metal gates in the background and then the screen goes black.
Sandra takes the phone back and smiles. Braian, at least for now, appears to be ok. But it hasn’t always been that way.
‘One of the first times Braian called me after his arrest, he said: “I can’t breathe. Please, Mum, get me out. I can’t stand it anymore.”’ Sandra recalled, the smile disappearing from her face. ‘He made a mistake and he takes responsibility for it. But just because someone he met died two days later, why should he be condemned like this?’
On Saturday, the Daily Mail revealed how Braian first met Liam Payne on the evening of October 2 last year at the exclusive Cabana Las Lilas restaurant in the upmarket Puerto Madero area of Buenos Aires, where Paiz was working as a waiter and Payne was dining with his girlfriend Kate Cassidy and close friend Roger Nores.
Close to midnight, as the restaurant was closing up, Payne, who was unsteady on his feet, spoke with a star-struck Braian after the pair had made eye contact then asked if he had any cocaine.
Braian did not, but it was a fateful moment, for he wrote down his Instagram handle on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into Liam’s hand as he left the restaurant. And 11 days later, on October 14, Payne contacted him again, once more asking for drugs.
This time, as Braian admits in his witness statement, ‘He ended up convincing me to get [drugs] for him. And, in all honesty, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see him again. That’s why I agreed to do it.’
Braian, who is gay, delivered the cocaine to Payne’s hotel and spent what he described as an ‘intimate’ night with him, in which he helped the star to shave and took drugs with him. Whatever took place was clearly intense, but Braian has previously insisted the two men did not have sex.
Two days later, the One Direction star was dead, having fallen in a state of semi-consciousness from his hotel balcony. Braian was arrested and jailed a few weeks later.
The Daily Mail travelled 30km south from Buenos Aires to the deprived suburb of Berazategui to meet the heartbroken single mother of seven, 46-year-old Sandra Paiz, whose life has been turned upside down by her middle son’s incarceration. A situation made worse by the fact Braian not only denies the drug dealing charge against him – he insists he provided the cocaine but did not sell it – but no date has yet been set for a trial due to bureaucratic wrangling over whether the case falls under national or local jurisdiction.
In this highly emotional interview, Sandra Paiz describes the torment her family has suffered at what she describes as a brazen ‘miscarriage of justice’ and gives the most honest account yet of the young man she affectionately calls ‘Nahuel,’ but who the rest of the world knows as Braian Paiz, the 26-year-old who spent the night with Liam Payne just before the star’s death.
Berazategui is a world away from the well-heeled glamour of Buenos Aires. The single-storied homes are crumbling, with cracks in the walls, missing windowpanes and front doors held shut with padlocks and chains.
It was nightfall as the Daily Mail arrived at Sandra’s dilapidated home. Stray dogs were barking into the darkness and Sandra opened the door just ajar, peeping anxiously down the street in both directions.
Inside and we sat around a small dining table in the main room – a bedroom was concealed by a thin curtain – and shared a cup of mate tea while Sandra produced a small box of colourful pastries.
The Daily Mail’s Fred Kelly visited Sandra and Nicole at their home in Berazategui, a suburb of Buenos Aires
Braian in prison. Sandra tells Fred: ‘I only get to see him through glass. I have no direct contact with him. It makes me so angry’
In one corner of the room there’s a rusting cooker with missing gas knobs, a small fridge and a microwave. Black mould is creeping down from the ceiling and there’s a large crack in the wall leading to the bedroom Sandra now shares with her youngest daughter, 19-year-old Nicole.
The Paiz family used to live around the corner in a larger home. However, following Braian’s incarceration in January this year, insurmountable legal bills meant Sandra had no choice but to downsize. ‘I had to sell everything. I had almost finished setting up a little hairdressing salon, but with everything that happened with my son, I had to sell it all.’
Today, she scrapes by on a modest state benefit while working one day a week as a cleaner in affluent Puerto Madero – the same district where her son Braian worked as a waiter before his arrest.
The first Sandra heard of her son’s implication in Liam Payne’s death was on November 8 last year. She was lying in bed watching the news – totally oblivious to who Liam Payne even was – when Braian’s face appeared on the broadcast. Her heart dropped. It was a mother’s worst nightmare.
The following day, Sandra launched a desperate bid to find her son, who had moved apartments in July in order to work in the heart of Buenos Aires.
‘The next day, we couldn’t find him,’ Sandra recalled, the panic repeating in her face. ‘My daughter went to look for Braian and she found his apartment. He was locked inside, nervous, listening to music. And he wasn’t answering the door to anyone.’
Sandra went on to explain how on November 5 – almost three weeks after Payne’s intoxicated fall from a third-floor balcony – Braian had been fired from his job at Las Lilas restaurant, leaving him without an income and he had been warned of imminent eviction by his landlord as it was clear he would no longer be able to afford the rent.
‘To begin with, he didn’t dare tell us what had happened,’ Sandra continued. ‘He was just waiting in that little apartment to see what would happen, if any notification from the authorities would arrive.’
Sandra did what any mother would and took Braian back to the family home.
‘He was climbing the walls like a spider,’ Sandra said. ‘He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He locked himself in a little bedroom and wouldn’t come out. He didn’t want to eat unless I lay down with him. I tried to bathe him. He just cried and cried.’
On Friday, January 3 this year, after two months fraught with anxiety, officers from Argentina’s Special Investigations Division turned up at the family home and arrested Braian on suspicion of selling drugs to Payne in the early hours of October 14.
‘At first, we didn’t understand anything,’ Sandra recalled. ‘I asked him at the time, and he didn’t understand either – he was in shock. My son never tried to flee or anything. He always looked for ways to cooperate with the investigation.’
The nine months since the arrest have been a living hell with Braian formally charged in February and since denied a move to house arrest despite being beaten up in jail for his sexuality and suffering a serious urinary tract infection for which proper medical assistance was not immediately provided.
‘I am very angry about the justice system,’ Sandra explained. ‘Because, unfortunately, they acted poorly and didn’t conduct a proper investigation before charging him. For example, even though I handed in his mobile phone, it wasn’t even examined until March.’
For now, Sandra has to survive on the occasional phone call from Braian and intermittent visits to him in prison: ‘I only get to see him through glass. I have no direct contact with him. It makes me so angry. The other day we were both crying.’
Sandra also has the burden of providing Braian with food – as is common for families of imprisoned Argentines: ‘They’re supposed to give you food in prison,’ Sandra explains. ‘But it’s bad food.’
Furthermore, Braian, like many other inmates, has had to give away some of his food and cigarettes to other inmates in an attempt to guarantee his safety – while inside he has been burnt with boiling water, struck with a metal canister and threatened with electrocution.
Thankfully, a few days ago Braian was moved to a new prison where conditions are significantly better. In the new facility, Braian is being held in a special LGBT wing: ‘He can only share space with two other people in the LGBT unit,’ Sandra explains. ‘It’s a bit bigger, but there are cameras everywhere, bars, constant surveillance.’
One thing Sandra has done to protect her son on the inside is insist that only family members are allowed to visit him. ‘I don’t want other friends going,’ she explained. ‘Because they might try to pass him something they shouldn’t…’
Sandra went on to clarify that while she is aware that her son smoked weed, ‘he was never in a dependent relationship with drugs. Obviously, when you open the door and they go out into the world, you’ll never know as a mother how they will behave. But I never gave my children a bad example.’
‘He was super polite. If you ask anyone what he was like, they’ll tell you he was very respectful. As his mother, he never once answered back to me,’ Sandra recalls of her son as a child
At this point in our conversation, Sandra was handed a shoebox full of mementos from Braian’s childhood by her daughter, Nicole. It contained everything from a kindergarten award for being a ‘best friend’ to a hairdressing certificate, CVs and modelling photos.
‘He had so many friends,’ Sandra recalled, shuffling through the documents. ‘All his life he wanted to become someone. He was very focused on doing things. Even when other kids didn’t understand something, he had no problem helping. And he was super polite. If you ask anyone what he was like, they’ll tell you he was very respectful. As his mother, he never once answered back to me.’
It was impossible not to think Sandra was speaking as if Braian was gone for good.
‘When people started saying Braian could spend many years in prison, I got really angry,’ Sandra continued with tears in her eyes. ‘They can’t treat him like this… if they sentence my son for having sold those grams, then the justice system isn’t working properly.’
Of the five individuals originally implicated in Liam Payne’s death, the only two to have been formally charged are Braian Paiz and Ezequiel Pereyra. Two working-class boys from rough neighbourhoods.
Pereyra – a cleaner at the CasaSur hotel – has similarly been charged with selling Payne drugs and is also languishing in a jail cell awaiting trial. Speaking to the media earlier this week, Pereyra confessed that ‘If the hotel had acted differently Liam could have been saved.’ Indeed, haunting pictures the Daily Mail published last year of the pop star being dragged from the hotel lobby unconscious minutes before his death have long thrown into question the actions of hotel lobby staff.
And yet, two CasaSur employees – chief receptionist Esteban Grassi and senior manager Gilda Martin – had the charge of negligent homicide against them dropped in February this year.
When the Daily Mail approached Mr Grassi this week for comment on the anniversary of Payne’s death, the tall greying man sniffed down his nose and said he wasn’t even aware of it.
‘The last hug I had with Nahuel was as we lay in bed at home,’ Sandra told me as we said goodbye. ‘We hugged and we cried. And I told him as I always do: “I’ll never leave you behind.”’
