Andy Williams, Every Time I Die Guitarist and AEW Wrestler 'The Butcher,' Dead at 48

Andy Williams, the founding guitarist of metalcore band Every Time I Die and a professional wrestler known as "The Butcher," died Saturday night after collapsing during a match near Pittsburgh. He was 48.

Williams was wrestling in the main event of Enjoy Wrestling's Five-Year Anniversary show at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, Pennsylvania, according to CBS News. He and his longtime partner, Jesse "The Blade" Guilmette, were defending the tag team titles against TME when Williams went down near the end of the match.

According to wrestling news site Fightful, cited by Loudwire, Williams' legs "buckled" before he fell to the floor. Guilmette tried to help him up, but Williams "collapsed again and passed out," Fightful reported. Attendees told Fightful that on-site medical staff used a defibrillator on Williams before paramedics arrived.

Enjoy Wrestling said in a statement on X that its doctors administered CPR until an ambulance reached the venue. "We sent everyone home and are at the hospital now waiting for more information," the promotion wrote, according to NBC News. Williams was taken to Allegheny General Hospital.

He died Saturday night. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed his death to TMZ, and Williams' agent confirmed it to Pittsburgh's KDKA-TV on Sunday morning, according to CBS News. No cause of death has been released.

A Band and a Second Career

Williams grew up outside Buffalo, New York, expecting to follow his father and uncles into factory work, he told wrestling personality Renee Paquette in a 2022 interview cited by NBC News. He said he lived with dyslexia and other learning disabilities that kept him from reading music, but picking up a guitar "just made sense."

He co-founded Every Time I Die in 1998 and played rhythm guitar on all nine of the band's studio albums, according to Rolling Stone, ending with 2021's "Radical." Epitaph Records, which signed the group in 2008, credited the band with "turning chaos into catharsis, pairing breakneck intensity with anthemic hooks and off-kilter grooves." The band disbanded in 2022.

Williams didn't stop making music. In 2025 he formed Atomic Rule with vocalist James Henderson, bassist Travis Bennington of Eternal Sleep, and drummer Kevin Boutot, formerly of The Acacia Strain, according to Loudwire. The band released a demo EP that year. Hours before his final match, Williams posted a video on Atomic Rule's Instagram saying the band had just finished writing and tracking new music and was booked to tour with Gwar in November and December.

"What a productive week we just had," he said in the video, according to Loudwire. "We have a lot of stuff we need to announce that we can't right now, and we're really excited about it."

Williams didn't take up wrestling seriously until his mid-30s. He told the "HardLore" podcast in 2025 that attending a Pro Wrestling Guerrilla show around 2014 was what convinced him to try it himself. He wrestled his first full match in 2015 at age 37, debuted for All Elite Wrestling in 2019 as one half of "The Butcher and The Blade," and stayed with the company and its sister promotion Ring of Honor for roughly seven years. Ground News reported the team had been used sparingly by AEW over its final 18 months before departing the company in June 2026.

Tributes Pour In

AEW released a statement calling Williams "a trailblazing musician with ETID 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." Enjoy Wrestling posted simply, "Butcher Forever."

Wrestlers including CM Punk publicly reacted to the news, according to a CinemaBlend piece aggregated by Ground News, and Williams' former Every Time I Die bandmate Jordan Buckley asked fans on social media for prayers.

The medical examiner's office has not said what caused Williams' collapse, and no autopsy findings have been made public as of Sunday. Fans of Atomic Rule are also left without answers on the unreleased music and tour announcements Williams teased just hours before he died.