shift lever assembly failure - any ideas as to a possible cause????

Hello- I would be interested if anyone had this happen, or could think of a reason that it did - I have a 2003 Tundra, 4WD, 8 cyl. automatic regular cab/8 ft. bed truck. Yesterday the metal collars that attach the shift lever to the steering column cracked in half . I was parked (in a FLAT parking lot), went to shift into reverse, and the shift lever was totally loose and could be moved in any direction. When the service dept. looked at it, they said the metal collars had cracked in half. The other bad thing is that, of course, I couldn't get it into neutral when the guy came to winch it up on the flatbed truck to haul it back to the dealer, and he had to drag it up with the wheels locked in place. I'm concerned that this may have added to the damage, although I called the dealer before I let the guy drag it and he said it wouldn't hurt it over such a short distance (about the length of the truck plus a few feet). Anyone heard of this happening before? I searched on the internet and couldn't find anything similar. I always lock it up when parking - so no one else was in it. Thanks very much for your time!

I have a '02 4WD SR5 Tundra and haven't had any major problems with it other than getting some of the recall things taken care of.
About a week ago I was at the beach in Huntington and went to leave, pulled it into reverse to back out, and the lever broke exactly like yours. The tow truck driver got underneath and put it into reverse manually, of course making sure the parking brake was on and I was pressing on the brake pedal with both feet. I backed it out of the spot and stopped. Then he did the same thing but shifted it into drive. Said he could drive it onto the flatbed towtruck and take it to my mechanic OR I could just drive it there, just don't shift it. That's what I did.
$550 later it was fixed.

By the way, the mechanics couldn't believe that the shift ring could break the way it did and were asking me what the hell I did to snap it like that. Apparently they've never fixed one before.