ABILENE, Texas (BigCountryHomepage.com) – This last week has been one for the books in the Big Country. We had fires, arrests, car wrecks, you name it. What you most clicked on for the entire week, oddly enough, was a day-old story of an hours-long standoff. Check out this weeks top five stories!

This week’s top 5 in BCH’s Big Country Beat weekly countdown

Abilene ISD has entered a 4-year commitment to a program called “System of Great Schools” with TEA to evaluate each campus. As reporter Annabelle Tuggle outlined in her article, the district could transform some into all-boys or all-girls campuses, or even charter schools as soon as the 2024-2025 school year.

For its second week in the top five; after the Abilene Police Department revealed the results of a prostitution sting at a massage parlor, BCH was the first to report on it. The sting yielded the arrest of three employees. Clearly, though, people were most interested in reading between the lines.

Between both KTAB and KRBC’s Facebook pages, there were more than 430 comments and 400 shares from here to Houston, even Colorado.

The Anson Police Department received a call for a suspicious tube in an outdoor trash can at the Allsups Convenience store on Commercial Avenue. Closer inspection revealed that it was a long PVC pipe, capped on both ends with tape.

Anson Chief of Police Daniel Graziose told reporter Noah McKinney he made a call to Dyess Airforce Base to gauge their assessment of the situation.

The investigation revealed that it was merely filled with sand.

Unfortunately, people are always going to want to see the details of a near tragedy. On Monday, a man walking his bicycle on the Winters Freeway was hit by a car near Antilley Road.

What started out as a traffic mystery Thursday morning unfolded into a 7-hour standoff between a Betty Hardwick Center client with a firearm, threatening to kill himself, and the Abilene Police Department.

As Annabelle Tuggle reported, traffic was blocked along a stretch of South Clack Street around 9:30 a.m. and a young man was arrested around 4:30 that afternoon.

Tap here for a wrap of the situation plus a list of mental health resources.