we have a 2005 jeep wrangler with an automatic, 4-wheel drive transmission and it randomly decided to not want to go into gear. the gear shifter just slips around, and it’s just stuck in park, and we had a hard time getting the shifter to go back up into the park position on the shifter indicator (sorry, not sure of the technical term). we got it towed home (thank goodness for aaa 
and can’t get it into the mechanic until tomorrow, i was just fishing around for ideas of what it may be.
Most likely the shift cable is become disconnected from the sector arm or the cable itself is broken. Alternately the cable end could have come loose from the shifter mechanism itself. It should not be a major deal to fix this.
ok. will be sure to make a point to look/ask the mechanic to look at that. Is this cable easily visible? Thank you so much for the quick reply that is huge!
The most likely location of the disconnect is at the transmission and not too difficult to access and often can be repaired with a cotter pin. If the cable itself is damaged the repair will be somewhat more complicated and expensive.
alright, will check that out first thing. thanks so much for your help.