The bruises and cuts on Kenny Lazo's face were barely visible as he lay in his open coffin at a Bay Shore funeral home.

But beneath the makeup, there are dark bruises and cuts, worse than the ones his family said they saw in a photo of the right side of his face when they went to identify his body at the medical examiner's office.

A photo his girlfriend took of him Wednesday before the funeral shows the other side of his face, a purple bruise under his left eye and a thick scratch on his cheek. "The photograph says everything," Lazo's father, Alfonso Lazo, said at Rose's Funeral Home, where the image was passed around.

What role these wounds played in the 24-year-old man's death is at the heart of the family's struggle for answers, and one of the questions investigators are probing.

According to Suffolk police, Lazo was selling drugs in West Islip and struggled with three officers who tried to arrest him. He allegedly tried to grab an officer's gun, prompting them to beat him with flashlights. He collapsed about 30 minutes after his arrival at the Third Precinct, was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, police said.