Every Time I Die is giving Andy “The Butcher” Williams something permanent. Jordan Buckley, the band’s founding guitarist and Williams’s longtime musical partner, announced on September 28 that a statue and memorial bench honoring Williams will be built at Gratwick Riverside Park in North Tonawanda, New York, the small Buffalo-area town where Williams grew up. The statue depicts Williams seated on the bench, positioned along a stretch of the Niagara River Greenway. Buckley shared the news himself:
“We’re building a statue of Andy! Get bricked up for The Big Man and help out by putting your name/message on the path to his bench,” Buckley wrote.
Get Bricked Up
The memorial is being funded the way a lot of this band’s community gets things done: directly, from the fans up. Through the Andy Williams Forever initiative, supporters can buy a $206 engraved brick (up to three lines, 20 characters each) to be laid along the path leading to Williams’s bench, a permanent, literal piece of the walkway to him. No unveiling date has been announced yet, but the brick program is live now at andywilliamsforever.com.
The Butcher, Remembered by Both Worlds
Williams died on September 5 at 48, after a medical emergency during a tag team match for the independent promotion Enjoy Wrestling near Pittsburgh. He’d spent more than two decades as a founding member of Every Time I Die, the Buffalo metalcore band he built with Buckley from 1998 until its 2022 split, and more recently fronted a new project called Atomic Rule. In wrestling, he was half of AEW’sThe Butcher and The Blade, alongside manager The Bunny, a trio that became a dependable, hard-hitting fixture of the promotion’s early Dynamite years.
Former AEW executive Cody Rhodes remembered Williams as warm and genuinely thoughtful underneath an intimidating look, a description that lines up with just how fast his own bandmates and the wrestling world mobilized to keep his name somewhere permanent. The Stunner previously covered Williams’s death and AEW’s $100,000 MusiCares donation made in his honor. A statue in his own hometown, paid for one brick at a time by the people who loved his music and his wrestling in equal measure, is exactly the kind of tribute that fits both.
