It didn’t say really that went through the tail as in out the back end of the airplane. I understood it to be saying that it went through an interior bulkhead and disabled the hydraulics. The wording was newspaperese and not very precise.
“sending an armored vehicle through the plane’s tail”
Sounds clear enough to me. And if that is what the jury fell for, the verdict needs to be reversed.
Load shift moved the aircraft’s center of gravity (CG) aft. Impossible at that point to lower the nose (more accurately, get more wind over the the wings). Stall. Spin. End. I once experienced a full aft track ratcheting of my (pilot) seat upon rotation. Had no forward control authority due to pitch angle/aft CG/gravity preventing moving the seat forward. Airspeed was bleeding off closer to stall. What did I do?