WWE Wrestler, Bray Wyatt Dies At 36

Windham Lawrence Rotunda, who was best known for his time in the WWE and for using the ring names Bray Wyatt and The Fiend, has is dead.

Rotunda died at age 36 after a heart attack on August 24, 2023. WWE’s head content developer and former wrestler Triple H made the announcement of Rotunda’s passing on Twitter. Since February, Rotunda had been apparently suffering with a fatal sickness that had not been made public.

Rotunda had reportedly been making good progress toward rehabilitation just days before he passed away, and two weeks prior to that, he had received a medical clearance for a WWE comeback. Soon after his passing, it was discovered that COVID-19, which had aggravated a pre-existing heart condition, was the cause of his illness.

Windham Lawrence Rotunda was an American professional wrestler. He is survived by his partner, his four children, his father, grandfather, brother and uncles. Rotunda and his ex-wife, Samantha, married in 2012 and had two daughters together before she filed for divorce in 2017. Rotunda and WWE announcer JoJo were revealed to be together during this time. They later had a son (born May 2019), whose godfather is wrestler Braun Strowman, and a daughter (born May 2020). They became engaged in 2022.

Rotunda was a third-generation professional wrestler, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Blackjack Mulligan, his father Mike Rotunda, and two of his uncles – Barry and Kendall Windham. His younger brother Taylor Rotunda is also a professional wrestler, best known as Bo Dallas. Alongside his brother, he held the FCW Florida Tag Team Championship twice while in WWE’s then-developmental territory Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW), where he wrestled under various ring names between 2008 and 2012. He briefly wrestled on WWE’s main roster from 2010 to 2011 under the ring name Husky Harris, most notably as a member of The Nexus.

After returning to WWE’s developmental territory, which had been rebranded as NXT, Rotunda was repackaged as Bray Wyatt. Portrayed as the villainous leader of The Wyatt Family, a bayou-dwelling cult, he returned to the main roster alongside Wyatt Family members Luke Harper and Erick Rowan in 2013. He subsequently became a three-time world champion in WWE, holding the WWE Championship once and the Universal Championship twice. He also held the SmackDown Tag Team Championship (with Luke Harper and Randy Orton under the Freebird Rule) and the Raw Tag Team Championship (with Matt Hardy) once each.

He was released from WWE in July 2021 but returned at Extreme Rules in October 2022, with a new character that claimed to be his “real-life” self but gradually re-incorporated his multiple personalities in addition to some new ones. His second return would be cut short as after taking time off beginning in February 2023 due to contracting COVID-19, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack that August. During his second return, he only had one televised match, which was at the 2023 Royal Rumble.

Fellow wrestlers, including The Rock, Mick Foley, Alexa Bliss and Matt Hardy, paid tribute on social media.