UPDATE:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/deadly-plane-crash-on-super-bowl-sunday-remains-a-mystery/ar-BBThCud?li=BBnbcA1Pastini took off from Fullerton Airport around 1:35 p.m. and flew about 10 miles, reaching as high as 7,800 feet, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, when witnesses saw his plane on fire, plummeting through the clouds and leaving a black trail of smoke, authorities said. Moments later, its tail and wings came off.
At one home, an engine alternator torpedoed through a first-floor window, flying through two rooms before landing in a bathroom. Fragments of exhaust pipe crashed through a second-floor window and melted into the carpet.
Neighbors suspect the second wing, carrying a fuel tank, is what erupted in flames at the home where the four people died. It was the one big piece of the plane they didn't see around the neighborhood.
Investigators with the Federal Aviation Administration and the NTSB combed through the wreckage Monday and collected pieces of the aircraft, which were being taken to a Phoenix storage facility. NTSB officials said the investigation could take 18 months.
Tom Anthony, director of the University of Southern California's Aviation Safety and Security Program, said video of the crash shows the "the aircraft broke up in air."
"We can see fire and black smoke, and that suggests a lot of fuel," he said.
Anthony said the aircraft's debris field also reflects that this was a midair breakup and that the wreckage essentially fell in two areas. He said such breakups tend to be caused by pilots putting undue stress on the plane's frame with high speeds, hard turns or drastic ascents.
Anthony said the age of the plane, a 1981 Cessna, is not as important as how it was maintained and flown over the years.
"It is important here for investigators to examine the maintenance and conditions it was kept," he said. "How it was operated in terms of altitudes, speeds and G loads. If you put a lot of heavy G loads on a plane over time, it will stress the fuselage."
Pastini himself is a bit of a mystery.
He was initially identified by California authorities as a retired Chicago police officer. But a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department said Pastini was never employed by the department and was carrying a Chicago police badge that had been missing since 1978.
Carrie Braun, spokeswoman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, said the metal police star recovered from Pastini's body "appeared to be legitimate."
It's unclear how Pastini got the badge.
Braun said Pastini was born Jordan Isaacson and changed his name in the 1970s.
According to records, Pastini once owned a restaurant, Kim Lee's Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar, in Gardnerville, Nev., south of Carson City.
A 1997 article about youth programs in the Reno Gazette-Journal described Pastini, then-owner of Kim Lee's, as a retired Chicago police officer who had been, in his own words, on "both sides of the law, as criminal and cop." He described being born in a melting-pot neighborhood of Greeks and Italians.
"We got along really well with the Greeks, but we didn't get along with the Germans," Pastini told the newspaper. "When we got into a fight, we used our hands and sticks. Now, they use guns and knives."
At the time, he told the reporter that he was arrested on suspicion of grand theft when he was 14 and added: "I didn't have a social worker when I got out. We didn't have the bleeding heart, goody-two-shoes. We were bad kids and we were treated as such. We had discipline in those days."
Another article in the Reno Gazette-Journal described him as a 17-year Chicago Police Department veteran who was a detective sergeant when he left the force in 1986.
Articles described Pastini as being involved with youth programs and charity efforts, including those intended to help out the families of fallen police officers. A headline of one story read, "Ex-cop brings piece of Chicago with him."
A daughter, Julia Ackley of Torrance, in L.A.'s South Bay area, told the Los Angeles Times this week that her father was a veteran pilot who regularly flew from Nevada to visit her family.
On Wednesday, Ackley declined to talk to a reporter when asked to explain why her father had changed his name.