Here is another image of a piece of wreckage that fell from the plane into a parking lot, taken from a BBC article. It too looks like it came from some kind of aerodynamic failure, rather than being dislodged by impact from a stray engine, or stray engine part. What part of the plane is it?
This is the most perplexing crash. At first I thought that this crash may have been a replica of the American Airlines DC10 crash at Chicago, where the engine pylon failed because of improper pylon attachment. That engine rotated over the wing and hit the top of the wing, causing all the hydraulic problems that made the plane uncontrollable.
In this case I first thought that the engine may have broken off and flipped up over the wing with sufficient force to cause the wing to fail, or to somehow subsequently hit the tail assembly.
But the problem with this kind of conjecture is that both the engines appear to be near the fuselage on the ground, while the nearly undamaged stabiliser appears to have left the aircraft at some point in flight before the subsequent trajectory of the debris found on land.
The pictures of the engine at the service station are also unusual, in that to my untrained eye the only damage to that engine is ground impact damage. Did it also come off because of aerodynamic forces rather than because of some internal failure?
I too am of the mind that there may be some some structural cause of this crash other than engine failure. Where is the rest of the rudder? It should also be out in Jamaica Bay somewhere, should it not?