Andy “The Butcher” Williams collapsed as a tag-team match near Pittsburgh, Pa. 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, N.Y., metalcore act Every Time I Die, playing rhythm guitar.
He went down at Enjoy Wrestling’s “Five Years” anniversary show, staged at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, Pa., as his bout was wrapping up. An ambulance took him to Allegheny General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at about 9:43 p.m., the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office told TMZ. An autopsy has been performed. Nearly a week later no cause has been made public, and the office says the determination waits on testing.
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 The Mane Event, with the promotion’s tag team championship on the line. He seemed unsteady as the bout went to its finish, then dropped; Guilmette tried to lift him before waving for help. Crew, medics and spectators cleared a path, and he was given chest compressions and a defibrillator before being carried out, according to a witness, Rich Fann. He collapsed a second time on the way to the back. 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 that night. Two days later its co-owner, Kurt Hackimer, added that medics on site had “indicated that the symptoms were consistent with a cardiac event.” Where Williams struck his head is unsettled: Millvale Borough Police, who were dispatched at about 8:45 p.m., recorded a report that he “had struck his head on a ring post,” while Hackimer said he “collapsed at ringside after his match on Saturday and hit his head on the floor.” Officers found “no visible signs of trauma and no indications of foul play.”
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, after a card he attended in Southern California staged by the independent promotion Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. He trained and took indie bookings while still touring with his band, and worked his first complete match in 2015, at 37. Music and wrestling struck him as two forms of the same work: anyone who can write a song can structure a match, he said, because both are built out of peaks and valleys.
“The Butcher” debuted in All Elite Wrestling (AEW) on the November 27, 2019, episode of Dynamite, when he and the Blade attacked Cody Rhodes. He stayed nearly seven years with the company, working its Ring of Honor brand as well. That run ended in June 2026, when the pair’s contracts expired without renewal, sending them back to independent shows. Away from the ring people described him as mild-mannered; in it he was a heavily tattooed brawler with a permanent snarl.
Nine Albums and a New Band
From the band’s founding in 1998 — by Williams, Jordan Buckley and Michael Novak — until its dissolution in January 2022, he played rhythm guitar in Every Time I Die. The group cut nine studio records on Ferret and then Epitaph, and his playing turns up on every one of them; that run closed with 2021’s “Radical.”
His father and uncles had worked in factories, and Williams, who grew up in North Tonawanda outside Buffalo, assumed he would end up doing the same. Learning disabilities, including dyslexia, kept him from ever learning to read music, though the instrument itself came easily. “I just picked up a guitar and it just made sense,” he told Renee Paquette on her podcast in 2022. He told the interviewer Alicia Atout in 2017 that his “true life calling is just to make my friends laugh.”
Once the band wound down he put together Atomic Rule, first teased in late 2024, which released a three-song demo last September. In a video posted to the band’s Instagram account hours before his collapse, he said the group had finished a week of writing and had dates lined up supporting Gwar from mid-November into early December. “Get ready, because Atomic Rule is going to be coming and smashing it,” he said in the clip.
Tributes From Both of His Worlds
AEW called him “a trailblazing musician with Every Time I Die and Atomic Rule” who “made a successful transition into the world of professional wrestling and was incredibly respected by his peers both in and out of the ring.” It rang the ten bells on Dynamite and has said it will devote part of Saturday’s Collision to him. Corey Graves, the WWE commentator and Pittsburgh native, told WTAE that Williams was “a truly good guy that no one could say a bad word about.”
Jordan Buckley, his bandmate of 24 years, posted asking for prayers when word came that Williams was in hospital. “Today is the saddest day of my entire life,” he wrote afterward. “Everything you read about him is true.” Josh Eppard, the Coheed and Cambria drummer who met Williams in 2019 when Every Time I Die supported his band on tour, wrote: “Peace to Andy, the kind giant who I thought was doing some backyard wrestling stuff with his buddies until one day I saw his mug on the TV and was in stunned disbelief. The world will miss Andy and selfishly, so will I.”
Two Gatherings Ahead
Williams, whose full name was Andrew John Williams, was born on December 12, 1977, and lived in Scottsdale, Ariz. He is survived by his parents, Frank and Mary Williams; his fiancée, Hana DeVore; his sister, Angela Wawrzynek; and a niece, a nephew and two great-nieces. Family and friends will gather on Thursday, September 17, from 4 to 8 p.m. at the Gratwick Fire House in North Tonawanda, N.Y. A public memorial follows on Sunday, September 27, at Buffalo RiverWorks, with acoustic sets from members of Cave In and Four Year Strong and from Anthony Green. The family has asked that donations go to MusiCares.
Guilmette, his tag-team partner for years, stood in the ring beside him for what became Williams’ final match.
