woman witnesses accident - child gets hit by a car but isn't badly hurt - woman calls 911 and stays with child. when officers get there they start asking her questions. she tells them where she lives (points to it as it's right there), tells them her last name, then refuses to cooperate when the officer says he needs to id her for the accident investigation. she refuses to answer any more questions and walks away into her house and won't come back out. (turns out she has some muni warrants) i do not see a Failure to ID because she didn't give any fictitous info... what do you think? can this be an evading detention?

What reasonable suspicion does the officer have to detain her? If she is established on the scene as just a witness and not a suspect in any crime, and she refuses to cooperate, then she just has to be subpoenaed to a grand jury or to trial to testify. The officer cannot force her to stay or talk or otherwise get involved without a court order.

those are my thoughts at this point, too...just wondering if there is something that makes the detention of a witness a lawful detention anywhere in TX law that i am missing. I did notice that under the fail to ID statute there are two seperate prongs for a lawfully detained person and a witness to a criminal offense. This seems to further support that there is nothing that gives an officer a right to detain a witness...