I'm guessing the arrow broke when it hit whatever it hit in flight. Pure coincidence the pieces were close to one another.

Like I said, if you think of what it would take for a BH tipped arrow to NOT stick into SOMETHING......a deflection (in flight) is the only thing that makes sense.

It dont take much to deflect an arrow in flight.Small branch or thick weeds will do it.It just needs enough force to level the arrow out for it not to stick in the ground.Dont know where the OP is at but the grounds froze right now here making it even easier for a arrow not to stick in it.

An arrow breaking in flights gonna explode, its not gonna fall to the ground perfectly lined up with all the pieces within inches of each other.

Petasux
The ground around here was not frozen. In fact it really wasn't even frosty.
It really is so odd but i guess we will never know what happened

I had the same thing happen to me last week, I shoot gold tip expedition hunters and I have shot deer with these arrows and they have not broken.But the other day I was shooting at about dark I had 6 arrows all with the nockturnal lighted nocks on them I shot 5 of them and I had a good group, so I shot the last one and it went over the target and spun unnaturally.I recovered the arrow and found out that it must have been weak and it broke into 3 peices and I found them the same way u did.

Me too - I believe you hit low, arrow may have slapped the deer and she jumped and came down on your arrow breaking it.

4 or 5 years ago I bought my first dozen Beman carbon arrows & hit the range. The second arrow I loosed sounded & felt odd; it also struck the 3-d and fell to the ground. I found that the shaft seemed to have unwound in the middle and about 1/3 of the way back and was laying as you've described. Brand new arrow, first shot. I was nervous for the life of that dozen.

Im pretty open minded and you just reminded me of a dozen gold tips I had 4 or 5 years ago.Mine didnt break in flight but after the weather got below freezing I had {i think} 4 of them break 2/3 of the way down the shaft towards the nock end simply trying to get them back in the quiver.Odder yet was the fact where they broke it was a clean break, like someone had run them through a saw almost.Only thing I could figure was the shafts were defective to begin with and got somewhat brittle when they were exposed to below 0 temps enabling them to snap. So I could see a defective arrow breaking upon hitting the ground like that.