Control arm on the front passenger wheel. That corner planted into the road and threw the car into a spin.

Was it the control arm or the control arm ball-joint? Did you have any warning, i.e. was your suspension really loose?

This is something you should have noticed under normal circumstances.

It was used and deemed to be from damage the car had taken in an accident prior to us buying it. We knew it was involved in an accident previously, but it was supposed to have been professionally repaired (we got it from a Ford dealership iirc).

As far as anyone could tell post crash, the control arm had broken through, rather than coming loose.

You got super lucky. That's the kind of failure that can kill you easily by throwing you into oncoming traffic.

That's terrifying. Was this a Certified used vehicle or just a random on the lot?

Most factory CPO programs exclude accident vehicles (beyond simple bumper cover resprays from incompetent parallel parkers).

That's what I thought, guessing this wasn't certified. I put a lot of trust in certification programs. Also I should mention as a counterpoint to a "wrecked car" I have a "wreck" on my 2019 that didn't do anything but scratch my bumper while totaling the other car (8mph impact but steel bumpers) and has plummeted my trade in $8k.. sucks. I didn't even claim any insurance work or anything on it.

I wonder if I can somehow get that removed if I take it to get checked out at a frame shop, it's a brand new Jeep and this going to follow it everywhere. I don't recall ever hearing about people removing wrecks, though. Not trying to title-wash but prove that it's fine for the next buyer.

I honestly don't remember at this point.

It's always a good idea to thoroughly examine every detail of a used car before trusting it at high speeds on a highway. Sounds like it might have been quite difficult to detect this particular problem though if it was a barely visible hairline crack that just got worse over time. scary.

Not him but maybe as a uni student he was driving a crappy car that had problems before, more bad things happen to people without reliable hardware.

I am not indicating fault. I drove a $1500 car for 4-5 years.

Just wondering if the issue could have been prevented. Loose balljoints are notoriously hard to diagnose, since they are supposed to have movement and it's hard to distinguish "play" and "movement".

A ball joint popping out of the steering knuckle is probably one of the most critical failures your car can have. Hard to think of anything worse.

Even if your brakes all locked up at the same time, it would probably be safer, since there is less chance to immediately flip the car.