One of the billboards soliciting information about Seth Rich’s murder. (Photo by Rachel Kurzius)

The family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer is crowdsourcing funds to continue investigating his death and refute the conspiracy theories that have emerged as his homicide remains unsolved.

“It is an extraordinary cry for help from a family that desperately wants to grieve,” says Brad Bauman, a spokesperson for the Rich family. “Over the past several months, it’s become clear that the investigation is proceeding at a pace that is lending itself to a lot of people filling the void of a lack of information around the case with conspiracy theories and other unhelpful items like that.”

The page on GoFundMe comes less than a month after a Republican lobbyist who pledged to help the Rich family started to spew new conspiracies that the Russian government killed him.

The family said at the time that Jack Burkman didn’t brief or warn them that he would be spreading this theory, which they called “hurtful” and led them to question whether they could continue to work with Burkman. For his part, Burkman claimed he had the family’s full support.

The family’s spokesperson did not directly criticize Burkman, who has ponied up money for the billboards and signage still up around Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park and promised an additional $100,000 reward for finding Rich’s killer, even as he plans bizarre, attention-getting gambits like hiring actors to reenact the murders.

“The family certainly thanks Jack for the spotlight that he has brought to this case,” says Bauman. “But the truth is that the family needs to have the independence to ensure that this is being investigated in a responsible way and without any particular political or conspiratorial agenda.”

One Rich family member compared the feeling of seeing Burkman touting the conspiracy to “having a semi come up and t-bone you in the intersection when you think you’re doing fine. It catches you so off guard that you don’t just pause, you step backwards.”

Seth Rich’s family still thinks the 27-year-old Bloomingdale resident was killed during a botched robbery in the early morning hours of July 10.

With an absence of suspects and arrests in the case, though, it didn’t take long before some folks on sites like Reddit began turning Rich’s death into the stuff of pulp fiction.

Rich’s murder was one of a number of incidences of gun violence in the neighborhood over the early summer, but conspiracy theorists suspected foul play upon learning that he was found with his wallet, watch, and credit cards.

The theory went that Rich was killed by Hillary Clinton for his alleged involvement with the hacking of DNC emails, a speculation further intensified by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose website published the emails, saying that he would offer $20,000 for information identifying Rich’s killer. He couldn’t prove anything, but Assange implied in an interview that Rich may have been his source.

U.S. intelligence agencies say that Russian government hackers were responsible for the website breaches.

“Seth would be so offended” by the conspiracy theories, his mother Mary Rich said in October.

D.C. Police, which still has an open investigation, says investigators have not found any links between Rich’s job and his death. MPD does not publicly speculate on theories. Rich’s murder is one of 65 unsolved homicides in D.C. in 2016.

The family is seeking to raise $200,000 in order to raise public awareness through continuing flyers and signage, hire investigative and forensic services to work alongside the police, and maintain and increase reward money. So far, the page has pledges from more than 75 people totaling over $4,000. The page, signed by Rich’s brother Aaron, says that “Seth was an amazing person who only cared about trying to help others and make the world better.”

“The family will never stop until justice is served in this case,” says Bauman. “Even when cases go cold, there is somebody who knows something. We believe that by adding to the money that Washington D.C. has already put up, that we are providing a financial incentive for those folks to do the right thing.”