a night non precision approach with low clouds makes one prone to visual miscues. hitting trees means the plane was low.
For at least the last 1000 feet, the flight didn't appear to be descending much, but was way low.
The pic below is from google maps and I put an arrow across where the plane took out the tops of a few trees. The impact point is about 500 feet or so after the arrow or from the house in the pic. (The street pics on google are a little old since some of the trees on the left are not there anymore).
If you go to maps on google (here's the
location )
and zoom to street level, where you can see the berm that the front is resting on, you can see how low they where