RIVERDALE, Ga. (WXIA) -- At the top seat in Riverdale City Hall sits a woman who's been through the worst.
Dr. Evelyn Wynn-Dixon has received numerous awards for how many she's helped, but she is only able to help because she conquered some of her own personal demons.
"When you're that low, your brain doesn't work so good," Wynn-Dixon says of her toughest moments. "All you want is peace and a way out."
Wynn-Dixon has just begun her second term as Riverdale's mayor -- or, as she calls it, "the Momma of the City".
The city is not far from the one where she was raised -- Atlanta, specifically the Southeast Atlanta neighborhood of Peoplestown.
After high school, Wynn-Dixon says, "I had a scholarship to go to Fort Valley, but in school I got pregnant and had to come home. And then my mom died when my baby was six months old."
Just a young woman herself, she soon got married and had three more kids. But then her husband left, Evelyn was soon evicted, and suddenly she - and her kids - were homeless.
"I looked myself in the mirror, and here was this girl that used to have everything in the palm of her hand," she said, "but because I didn't love myself enough to say, 'No', I lost everything."
That's how this one-time honor student wound up at the Pryor Street Bridge in Atlanta, overlooking I-75, preparing to jump.
"I just didn't love me enough," Wynn-Dixon said, "and for a second it looked like I didn't love my kids enough to fight ... but I'm so happy that I didn't do it."
In the end, she says she was too scared to jump. In the weeks that followed, she found the fight to move forward. Wynn-Dixon went back to school at 35 and graduated with her two sons from the University of Georgia.
Then, in 2007, she was elected mayor of Riverdale. She now holds a position that has allowed her to help thousands -- and it makes her shiver to think she could have ended everything nearly four decades earlier.
"It could have been over but it's not," Wynn-Dixon said, "and I'm so grateful -- so very grateful."
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