The silly thing is they probably could have convinced the adjuster that it broke as a result of the collision and gotten it replaced as an add-on to the original estimate (that happens all the time once the shop starts working on a repair) but instead they chose to repair it like that.

I guess if it were mine I would ask politely for the shop owner to reimburse me for the part after showing him what you found - explaining to them that you're willing to forget it happened if they did but if they chose not to you'd be sure to cost them much more than $120 in bad word of mouth advertising. Normally that is enough to convince most prudent business owners to do the right thing.

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Marty D.

2013 C300 4Matic
1984 BMW 733i
2013 Lincoln MKz