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I would imagine that a plume of ball bearings set into the reentry path by one or more extremely low orbit satellites, such that the shuttle passed through it just a few minutes after reentry burn, would have not only damaged / loosened tiles, but at that speed, penetrated various points to a substantial degree. At a Mach 2 plus collision speed, it would be like getting shot up pretty bad. Not only that but control surfaces would likely have gotten multiple dings and thruster nozzles gotten dinged up as well. Perhaps just enough to create an out-of-angle or oscillating reentry. This thing was not designed to skip off the stratosphere - it's not a space plane per se. As old and fatigued as it must have been, a couple of skips like that and it would have been enough to break it up. Unless some other root cause gets solidly determined first, a detailed review of all forensic evidence and telemetry during the time between the reentry burn and the crash, looking for evidence of anything even remotely resembling what I have described, appears to be in order. Closing thought, in 1998, the ChiCOMs all but promised that someday they would do something like this.