LOS ANGELES — Tearful fans from California to Mexico set up candlelight shrines and memorials to Jenni Rivera, as investigators said it would take days to piece together the wreckage of the plane carrying the Mexican-American music superstar and find out why it went down. Authorities, meanwhile, began looking into the history of the plane's owner, Starwood Management of Las Vegas, which had another one of its planes seized by the US Drug Enforcement Administration in McAllen, Texas, in September. The US National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to help investigate the crash of the Learjet 25, which disintegrated on impact Sunday with seven people aboard in rugged terrain in Nuevo Leon state in northern Mexico. Fans of Rivera, who sold 15 million records and was loved on both sides of the border for her down-to-earth style and songs about heartbreak and overcoming pain, put up shrines to her in cities from Hermosillo, Mexico to Los Angeles. Some Spanish-language radio stations played her songs nonstop. The US-born woman known as the “Diva de la Banda” died as her career peaked. She was perhaps the most successful female singer in grupero, a male-dominated Mexico regional style, and had branched out into acting and reality television. — AP
