The father of former One Direction star Liam Payne’s girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, said his daughter is heartbroken by the sudden, tragic death of her pop star boyfriend.
“She’s grieving,” he told a Post reporter Thursday morning from the front door of their family home in Harrington Park, a leafy suburb in northeast New Jersey.
“I’ve been up all night,” he said, the emotion of the day clearly registering on his face.
He said his daughter Kate, 25, whom he called Kaitlin, wasn’t at home.
“Kaitlin’s not even here. She’s down in Florida,” he said.
A neighbor who didn’t want to give his name described the Cassidys as “a nice family.”
“It’s so sad. I really felt for them when I read it this morning,” he said.
The neighbor also said Kate had a bit of wild child in her, sometimes rebelling against her parents’ traditional Irish values.
“They’re such a nice family. And Kate, she was a bit of a wild one,” he said. “There’s an easement behind our houses here, and when she was younger I’d see her running down to meet up with her girlfriends and they’d be taking off layers because her parents were so strict.”
Speaking of Kate’s father, the neighbor said he’s “a nice, old-school working-class guy. And his wife, her mom, is just a traditional, nice Irish lady who goes back to Ireland once a year. Just nice people, a nice family.”
The neighbor said he was saddened when he learned the news of Payne’s fatal leap from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires after an apparent drug-fueled bender Wednesday night.
“I just can’t understand it. Why is somebody who has everything, such a young guy in his thirties, why would he throw it all away like that? I don’t — I can’t understand that.”
Kate Cassidy — who has been romantically linked to Payne, 31, for two years — had traveled to Argentina with her singer beau for a brief vacation and returned to Florida before the tragedy.
Cassidy has over 200,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram and often posts about her outfits, food travel and adventures she would go on with Payne.
