Andy “The Butcher” Williams collapsed as a tag-team match near Pittsburgh wound toward its finish, and he died hours later, on Saturday, September 5, 2026. He was 48. Williams wrestled professionally and helped found the Buffalo, New York, metalcore act Every Time I Die, playing rhythm guitar.
He went down at Enjoy Wrestling’s Five-Year Anniversary show, staged at Mr. Smalls Theater in Millvale, Pennsylvania, as his bout was wrapping up. An ambulance took him to a hospital, and he died later that night, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office told TMZ. Officials have not made a cause public, and they expect additional examination before one is settled on.
Collapse at a Five-Year Anniversary Show
Williams was working the match with Jesse “The Blade” Guilmette, his partner of years in the tag team The Butcher and The Blade, against TME. The rest of the card was called off and the audience was sent home.
“Our doctors on staff tended to him immediately, administering CPR until the ambulance arrived,” the promotion wrote on X.
Rich Fann witnessed the collapse. He told POST Wrestling that Williams looked wobbly as the match neared its conclusion and then dropped, and that Guilmette tried to get him back on his feet before waving for help. Ring crew, medics and audience members cleared a route out, by Fann’s account, and Williams got chest compressions, ice and a defibrillator before he was carried out on a board.
Dylan Meerhoff, who was in the audience, told WTAE that Williams went down a second time backstage. “I guess his legs buckled and he collapsed, and they were helping him up and carrying them to the back. And you just expect that’s part of the show because they do that sometimes. Then they got further back to take him out into the back room, and he collapsed again,” Meerhoff said in comments reported September 7.
Dispatch audio from Williams’ mid-match collapse was obtained in a September 7 update.
From Metalcore Stages to the Ring
Wrestling had gripped Williams since childhood, but he said on the “HardLore” podcast that the idea of trying it himself arrived only around 2014. What prompted it was a card he attended in Southern California, staged by the independent promotion Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. He trained and took indie bookings through the 2010s while still touring with his band, and he worked his first complete match in 2015, at age 37.
“The Butcher” debuted in All Elite Wrestling (AEW) in 2019, and Williams stayed nearly seven years with the company and its sister brand, Ring of Honor. That run ended in June 2026, when his contract went unrenewed, sending him and Guilmette back to independent shows.
Away from the ring, people described Williams as mild-mannered and laid-back. In it, he traded that for snarling menace, a heavily tattooed brawler who made up half of The Butcher and The Blade. Music and wrestling struck him as two forms of the same work, a comparison he made regularly. Anyone who can write a song can also structure a match, he told “HardLore,” because peaks and valleys are what both are put together out of.
Nine Albums and a New Band
From the band’s founding in 1998 until its 2022 dissolution, Williams played rhythm guitar in Every Time I Die, which he helped start. The group cut nine studio records, and his playing turns up on every one of them; that run closed with 2021’s “Radical.” Epitaph Records signed the band in 2008, and the split was announced in early 2022.
His father and uncles had worked in factories, and Williams, raised near Buffalo, assumed he would end up doing the same. Learning disabilities, including dyslexia, kept him from ever learning to read music, though the guitar itself clicked for him the moment he had one in his hands, as he told interviewer Renee Paquette in 2022. He said to wrestling personality Alicia Atout in 2017 that getting his friends to laugh was his true purpose in life.
Once the band wound down, Williams started Atomic Rule in 2023, and a demo EP followed in 2025. In a video posted to the band’s Instagram account hours before his collapse, he said the group had finished writing new songs and had dates lined up with Gwar in November and December. “Get ready, because Atomic Rule is going to be coming and smashing it,” he said.
Tributes From Both of His Worlds
AEW said in a statement on Sunday, September 6, that Williams’ death had saddened the company. The promotion called him a trailblazing musician with Every Time I Die and Atomic Rule who successfully moved into professional wrestling and drew deep respect from his peers both inside and outside the ring, and it offered condolences to his family, friends, and fans.
Corey Graves, a Pittsburgh native and professional wrestler, remembered Williams as a friend in remarks reported September 7. “His passion for music and wrestling was unlike anyone else’s. A truly good guy that no one could say a bad word about. He had an awesome presence and brought laughter to every room he was in,” Graves said.
Word that Williams had been hospitalized brought a post on X from Jordan Buckley, a former Every Time I Die guitarist, who asked anyone who prays to pray for him. The band Better Lovers was started by three Every Time I Die alumni, Buckley among them.
Coheed and Cambria’s drummer, Josh Eppard, got to know Williams on a 2019 tour. He said the death was beyond heartbreaking and recalled how hard it had been to believe it when a friend he assumed was just wrestling for fun with his buddies turned up on television.
Colin Young, the actor, musician and “HardLore” host, said in a statement that anyone who knew Williams came away feeling loved by him. Kind, funny, and deep, and talented in both of his careers — that was how Matt Hardy, a wrestler who worked with Williams at AEW, remembered him.
WWE star Cody Rhodes, who was part of The Butcher’s AEW debut, told OutKick Dropkick in comments reported September 7: “Maybe if you had judged that book by its cover, you wouldn’t know how truly special, intelligent, artistic, and beautiful of a person that he was.” Rhodes said of the debut: “He came up under the ring and they beat me up, and I definitely didn’t get to spend near enough time with him as a person.”
Guilmette, his tag-team partner for years, stood in the ring beside him for what became Williams’ final match.
