cell colspan breaks grid display

[Ashwin]

I have a fairly simple grid created from html markup. If I add a colspan attribute to a cell in my tbody,  the grid display does not render correctly. It works without the colspan attribute. 
See attached image for what the grid looks like before and after adding the colspan attribute.

[Josh Eastburn]

I am having the same problem with trying to have a cell on one of the rows in my grid span more than one column.
When I set colspan="2" in the <td> tag, I get the following JS error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'nodeName' of undefined,
                    file: kendo.web.min.js,
                    line: 10