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Homicide Watch D.C. will rise from its stasis. The two-year-old website that tracks every murder case in the District crossed its $40,000 fundraising threshold on Kickstarter last night, beating its goal with three days to spare.

With the crowd-sourced funding secured, the site’s publishers, Laura and Chris Amico, say they plan to immediately begin the recruiting drive to find the reporting interns they hope will resuscitate Homicide Watch. The Amicos relocated last month to Cambridge, Mass., where they are participating in a 10-month fellowship at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

Since the Amicos moved, Homicide Watch has been nearly dormant, posting only the occasional fundraising update; the last homicide it reported was the August 5 death of Simon Anderson, who was fatally shot on the 3500 block of Georgia Avenue. In the month since, there have been three more murders. The Kickstarter campaign launched August 14.

Now that Homicide Watch stands to receive more than $40,000, the Amicos intend to begin a hiring spree. In an email, Laura Amico says she plans to reach out to the journalism programs at area colleges for prospective candidates.

“As soon as we find the right first person we’ll start training them and get the site up and running ASAP,” she writes. “Being down three weeks is too long.”

Donations surged last night after the publication of New York Times media columnist David Carr’s latest column, which contrasted Homicide Watch’s Kickstarter campaign against the awards that major newspapers have received from large philanthropic organizations. Where Homicide Watch, an exhaustive operation run by one husband-and-wife team, pleads for donations from the masses, Carr notes that the Ford Foundation recently gave $1 million to the Los Angeles Times to cover ethnic and prison issues and $500,000 to The Washington Post to report on government accountability.

It bears wondering why a large organization like the Post needs a charitable boost to cover a topic that should be at the forefront on its home turf. Instead, Carr argues that it is the upstart operations like Homicide Watch that should be getting this foundational support:

A broader question lurks as well. Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots like Homicide Watch and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media? I am all for putting more reporting boots on the ground, but the existential dilemma confronting media will require new answers, not stopgap funds for legacy approaches. (I write these words knowing that I may well eat them someday. I wonder if I would be so picky about the source of funds if I were the one being financed.)

The more than 1,000 people so far who have given Homicide Watch money includes many journalists. Both Martin and I contributed, as did Washington City Paper editor Mike Madden. Further afield, Homicide Watch’s backers included Arianna Huffington, NPR digital strategist Andy Carvin, the tech blogger Anil Dash and Poynter’s Craig Silverman.

But perhaps the most impactful contributions came from the people who donated with a certain homicide victim in mind. “We saw people tweeting that they were donating in certain people’s memory,” Laura Amico tells DCist in an email. “This is journalism from the community for the community. Together we saved that.”