Near the end of a tag team match at Mr. Small's Theatre in Millvale, Pennsylvania, Andy Williams collapsed and died on September 5, 2026. He was 48.

For nearly a quarter century Williams had been the founding rhythm guitarist of the metalcore band Every Time I Die, and for the second half of his life he built an equally serious career in professional wrestling as The Butcher, teaming for years with Jesse Guilmette as The Butcher and The Blade.

The two pursuits looked incongruous from the outside: a hardcore-adjacent guitarist known for knotty, start-stop riffing, and a tag team wrestler who spent years grinding through AEW's crowded roster. Williams treated them as one discipline. "Wrestling, to me, is like writing a song ... there's an intro, there's an outro, there's a chorus," he said in an interview later recounted by Loudersound.

Williams was born December 12, 1977, in Buffalo, New York. He set out first to be a wrestler, and a knee injury sustained during his early training redirected him toward music instead. He co-founded Every Time I Die in Buffalo in 1998 and remained the band's guitarist for its entire run, POST Wrestling reported.

Every Time I Die released nine studio albums over the following two decades, closing with Radical in 2021 before the band announced its breakup in January 2022. Williams described his own playing as instinctive rather than trained. "I don't know how to read music. I just picked up a guitar and it just made sense. To me, it was more like Tetris than anything," he said. Touring and his second career made competing claims on him in those same years, he acknowledged: "One takes you away from your family for 40 days, you live in a van. The other takes you away from your family one or two days a week, but you're gone, gone."

He had trained for wrestling long before he got to do it regularly. Williams worked his first full singles match on the independent circuit in 2016, having trained in part under former UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett, and became a regular at Barnett's Bloodsport events. In 2017 he began teaming with Jesse Guilmette, who wrestled as The Blade, and the pair debuted on AEW Dynamite on November 27, 2019, managed by Allie as The Bunny, opening with an attack on Cody Rhodes.

The Butcher and The Blade spent more than six years as fixtures of AEW's tag division before their contracts expired in June 2026, WhatCulture reported. Williams's final AEW television appearance had come more than a year earlier, on the February 22, 2025 edition of Collision, against Gabe Kidd. By that March, wrestling fans had noticed the gap stretching past a year, and Williams admitted the silence weighed on him more than he let on publicly: "It does seep into your head, like, 'Dude, what did I do wrong?'" Asked in the same interview about his prospects, he stayed matter of fact: "Just waiting for the call for the return. Hopefully it happens soon."

He kept working regardless. In these years Williams's musical focus turned to a new band, Atomic Rule, which released the EP The Golden Rose in December 2025. On August 3, 2026, he stepped back into a wrestling ring against Josh Barnett, the trainer who had helped shape his career years before, at PRODUCE: Volume 3 in Brooklyn. It was his first match since leaving AEW.

Five weeks later, wrestling for Enjoy Wrestling at the promotion's "Five Years" anniversary show, Williams collapsed near the end of his tag match against TME. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed his death to TMZ.

Tributes reached him from both of his worlds. AEW's Matt Hardy called him "a joy to work with," adding that he was "a kind, funny & deep individual who was an extremely talented musician & wrestler." Ben Bishop, who wrestled alongside him for years, kept the memory light: "We laughed and joked about how silly the wrestling business can be." Fellow wrestler Athena remembered a smaller kindness: "You were always so kind and I truly do miss talking and exchanging food recipes." Tour manager Zack Cannon credited Williams directly for his own career, writing that he "straight up wouldn't be doing what I'm doing in the tour world or know the half the people I know today if wasn't for Andy Williams bringing me on tour with ETID back in the day."

The specifics of what Williams built are still countable. Nine Every Time I Die albums remain in circulation for the metalcore bands that grew up on his riffs. Atomic Rule, the project he had only just gotten off the ground, still has other musicians carrying The Golden Rose forward. The Butcher and The Blade's six years of AEW tag matches, and the independent bookings on either side of them, gave Jesse Guilmette a ring partner of a decade. Williams spent his adult life insisting that a metalcore guitarist and a professional wrestler could be the same person, and he kept proving it until the night his last match ended.