Benjamin Satterley, the pro wrestler known to fans around the world as Pac, died of bronchial asthma on Sept. 27, and Cook County’s medical examiner’s office confirmed on Friday that his death was natural. He was 40.
The timing sharpened the shock. Satterley had wrestled on All Elite Wrestling’s All Out pay-per-view just one day earlier, then died in Des Plaines, about 2 miles north of Chicago O’Hare International Airport, before the cause was publicly confirmed last month.
For years, Satterley built a reputation that stretched far beyond one company or one name. He came up through the British independent system before making the leap to Japan and the U.S., wrestled for AEW, World Wrestling Entertainment, New Japan Pro-Wrestling and Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, and was also known in World Wrestling Entertainment as Adrian Neville and in AEW as The Bastard.
The medical examiner’s ruling answers one question but leaves another untouched. It confirms the death was natural, even though it came so soon after a major match, yet it does not explain the exact circumstances behind the bronchial asthma that killed him. That gap is the reason the news still lands hard for fans who saw him perform and then learned he was gone.
The grief around him has been personal, not just professional. Marina Shafir said he was modest about how fascinating he was and that she would not be where she is today if she had not shared time and space with him. His family said he adored them and his sausage dog son, Wolfie, and Natalie wrote on Instagram, thanking him for their beautiful life and saying the family would try their hardest to get through the nightmare and look after each other as he would have wanted.
Days after his death, AEW turned its weekly Dynamite show into an emotional tribute, a reminder of how quickly the wrestling world moved from watching Satterley perform to mourning him. What remains now is the void between the confirmed cause and the unanswered circumstances that led to it.
