(November 1989 - 1 May 2012) (his death) (3 children)
three sons Dylan, Evan and Austin
He had settled in the West Hills area of the Valley with his wife, Lisa, and three sons. One, Evan, had followed in his father's athletic footsteps, playing basketball for UCLA's crosstown rival, the University of Southern California. According to friends, he had talked about returning to acting when he retired from Fox, as he expected to do in a few years.
In the meantime, his success was offset by marital and financial difficulties. Smith's friends say that the former had been ongoing for several years, after Lisa Smith had become devoutly religious. In turn, Gavin, they say, consoled himself with occasional extramarital affairs. "I know he wanted to reconcile and fix things with his wife," a high school classmate, Gordon Van Tassell, said after his disappearance. "It was a couple [of affairs] and it was only out of the darkest frustration. Maybe just looking for relief or tenderness or something. It wasn't like he was a sex machine."