Recently Lost: Amber Czech
On November 11, 2025, 20-year-old welder Amber Mary Czech was killed at her workplace, Advanced Process Technologies, in Cokato, Minnesota, by a male coworker who struck her with a sledgehammer; he has been charged with second-degree intentional murder, and prosecutors are considering a possible first-degree premeditated murder charge. The killing drew regional and national attention as an instance of workplace violence and raised urgent questions about safety and gendered harassment in male-dominated trades.
Amber was born on July 11, 2005, in Hutchinson, Minnesota, and graduated from Hutchinson High School in 2023, where she played basketball. She completed a 10-month welding technology program at Alexandria Technical & Community College, graduating with honors in May 2024, and began working as a welder at Advanced Process Technologies that summer. Colleagues, family, and community members have described her as a hardworking tradeswoman who took pride in her craft, loved her job, and even returned to her former high school to teach welding on her days off.
Amber’s killing received extensive local, statewide, and national coverage, often framed within broader debates about workplace violence, gender-based harassment, and safety for women in construction and manufacturing. Her funeral at St. Anastasia Catholic Church in Hutchinson drew long lines of mourners, and local businesses and community members organized fundraisers and symbolic actions, while tradeswomen’s groups and labor advocates used her case to call for stronger workplace protections and better mechanisms for reporting threats and harassment.
Please share Amber’s story in your networks so that her life, work, and the conditions that led to her death are neither minimized nor forgotten. This site also invites submissions of names and stories of other transmasculine homicide victims you know, so that the full scope of gendered and workplace violence can be documented and resisted in community.
