Andy Williams, the wrestler known as The Butcher, has died at 48.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed his death to TMZ on Sunday morning. No cause has been released, and an autopsy is pending.
Williams collapsed at the end of his match at Enjoy Wrestling’s Five Years event at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night. He was teaming with his longtime partner The Blade, Jesse Guilmette, against TME, challenging for the promotion’s tag team championship.
Enjoy Wrestling said in a statement that doctors on staff attended to him immediately and gave CPR until an ambulance arrived. The promotion cancelled the rest of the show, sent everyone home and went to the hospital, and thanked those who helped.
Williams and Guilmette had been a team for years before AEW existed and were among the first talent the company signed in 2019, arriving alongside Allie, now in TNA. The three debuted that November by cutting through the ring mat and attacking Cody Rhodes on the ninth episode of Dynamite, presented as hired guns for MJF. The Butcher and The Blade worked as a tag team for the company for years after that, later alongside Kip Sabian, and were one of the fixtures of AEW’s tag division in its opening seasons.
The act was built on a straightforward premise. The Butcher and The Blade were presented as brawlers rather than athletes, brought in to do damage on behalf of whoever was paying, and they worked that way for the length of the run. They never held a championship in AEW.
Williams made his professional wrestling debut in 2016, which made him a relatively late starter, and he continued working independent shows across the Northeast after the AEW run. Saturday’s match was a tag title challenge on an independent show five years into that promotion’s existence, which is the level he had gone back to working and appeared happy doing.
The Enjoy Wrestling booking was part of a full weekend for him. He and Guilmette had run a seminar for the promotion on the Friday night before the show.
Outside wrestling, he was a founding member of Every Time I Die. The band formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1998, and Williams played guitar in it for more than two decades across nine studio albums, in a run that made it one of the defining acts of American metalcore. The group played its final show in 2021 and announced it was breaking up the following January. Williams had not stopped since. He spent 2026 working with a new metalcore band, Atomic Rule.
Williams was touring internationally with a signed band while training and working as a wrestler, and kept both going once AEW signed him, which is a combination almost nobody in either industry manages. The AEW deal came when he was already in his forties and more than twenty years into the band.
There were several hours of conflicting information overnight. A wrestling podcaster reported the death on Saturday night and said he stood by his source when asked about it. Enjoy Wrestling publicly denied it early on Sunday, responding to a post repeating the claim by calling it untrue and asking for it to be taken down, then deleted the denial without explanation. The medical examiner’s confirmation to TMZ settled it several hours later.
Tributes began through the night from both sides of his working life, from wrestlers who came up alongside him in AEW and from musicians who played with him. His former Every Time I Die bandmate Jordan Buckley had posted on Saturday, asking anyone who prays to pray for him.
No statement from Williams’ family has been made public. AEW has not issued a statement.
