Andy Williams, AEW's The Butcher, Dies at 48

Some people get one career. Andy Williams got two, and both of them were extremely loud. Today's sports figure death is filed under a name Morty had to write twice to be sure: Andy Williams — not the crooner, not the man who sang Moon River, but a 6ft 3in, 273lb metalcore guitarist from Buffalo who decided halfway through life that playing to sold-out rooms wasn't enough and went to go get chokeslammed on national television instead. He died on 6 September 2026 at the age of 48, after collapsing at the end of a tag-team match in Millvale, Pennsylvania. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed it the following morning.

The desk gets a lot of dual-career paperwork. Actor-singer. Politician-lawyer. Influencer-entrepreneur, which usually means unemployed. It does not get many files where the two columns read founding member of Every Time I Die and professional wrestler who powerbombed a man through a table in front of a British crowd. That is not a résumé. That is a dare somebody accepted in 1998 and never withdrew.

The celebrity death nobody could categorise

Andrew Williams was born in Buffalo, New York on 12 December 1977 and raised in North Tonawanda, which is the kind of geography that produces people who are either extremely polite or extremely comfortable being hit. Williams managed both.

Here is the detail that makes the whole life make sense: wrestling came first. He trained at the Renegade Wrestling Association in Ontario for six months as a teenager, wrecked his knee, and was sidelined. During the layoff — bored, immobile, twenty — he learned to play guitar. In 1998 he formed Every Time I Die with Jordan Buckley and Michael Novak.

So the band, the nine albums, the Warped Tour sets, the two and a half decades of being one of the most beloved acts in American hardcore: all of that was the backup plan. Morty would like everyone to sit with that for a moment.

He appeared on every single Every Time I Die release and did not miss a single live show for twenty-two years — until January 2020, when he had to skip one because he was wrestling Diamond Dallas Page.

From the merch table to the top rope

In the mid-2010s Williams restarted his training, initially as a workout, with former UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett. He then drifted into Grapplers Anonymous in Lackawanna and leaned on his old friend Jesse Guilmette, who the world would come to know as The Blade.

His early independent run in 2015 was pure chaos. He ran in at Smash Wrestling in Toronto and chokeslammed a man called Tarik. He turned up at Progress Wrestling in London and put Jimmy Havoc through a table. His first proper singles match, in March 2016, ended in a loss and a torn meniscus — and he had surgery and went on tour with the band ten days later, because of course he did.

A year later he wrestled an intergender tag match at Joey Janela's Spring Break. Janela had offered him a bout against either Nikolai Volkoff or Glacier. Williams turned both down in favour of teaming with Penelope Ford. Morty has reviewed this decision at length and has concluded the man simply had taste.

The Butcher and the Blade, 2019–2026

On 27 November 2019 he debuted on AEW television as The Butcher, jumping Cody Rhodes alongside The Blade and The Bunny. It emerged shortly afterwards that the pair had been hired by MJF, which remains one of the great “my friend knows a guy” storylines in modern wrestling.

What followed was nearly seven years of honest work: feuds with Jurassic Express, an alliance with Eddie Kingston, a stint in the Hardy Family Office, a battle-royal win that earned a TNT Championship shot against Darby Allin, an AEW International Championship challenge against Orange Cassidy, and a long, respectable Ring of Honor run from 2023 onward. He tore a bicep in 2021 and later said he thought he could have kept going anyway.

Then in January 2022 Every Time I Die broke up. Williams posted four characters — RIP ETID '98–'21 — and went full-time into wrestling at 44, an age when most men take up padel. His AEW contract expired in June 2026, making him a free agent for the first time in seven years. He was back on an independent show three months later.

A wrestler death the whole locker room felt

He collapsed at the end of his match at an Enjoy Wrestling show at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale on the evening of 5 September. The promotion's on-site doctors performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The rest of the card was cancelled. He was pronounced dead, and the medical examiner announced it on 6 September.

The tributes arrived at the speed the internet reserves for people who were genuinely liked. AEW opened its 8 September Ring of Honor taping with a ten-bell salute led by Tony Khan, and honoured him again on the Rebel Heart edition of Dynamite. Commentator Excalibur put it about as well as anyone has: he looked like a hulking violent brute, and one conversation with him revealed anything but.

Two careers. Nine albums. One tag team. Zero people, apparently, with a bad word to say.

Morty's verdict

This is the part where the desk usually produces a cheerful number, and this time the number is not cheerful. American male life expectancy at birth sits in the mid-seventies. Forty-eight is roughly three decades short. There is no spin to put on that, and this office is not going to try, because the one rule here is that the site is a joke and the people in it are not.

So here is the honest arithmetic instead. Williams got 48 years and used approximately 90 of them. He was in a band that mattered for twenty-four straight years and never missed a show. He learned a second, physically ruinous trade in his late thirties and was good enough at it to spend seven years on national television. He tore a meniscus and went on tour. He tore a bicep and argued he could finish. He was, by every single account filed this week, kind — which is the one line on a CV nobody can fake and nobody can train for.

Most people spend their one life worrying they picked the wrong door. Andy Williams walked through two of them, sideways, at volume, and never once looked like he was in the wrong room. Morty has processed several thousand of these files and can confirm that is rarer than reaching ninety.

Desk closed. Somebody ring the bell ten times.

The running ledger of this year's famous deaths lives in our Dead Celebs guest book, the daily intake sits over on Who Died Today, and if a sudden cardiac event at 48 has you doing quiet maths about yourself, our life expectancy factors page is a more useful place to put that energy than the comments section.