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Tips Pour In as Reward for Info on Howard Beach Jogger's Killer Rises: NYPD

 Karina Vetrano, 30, was found in running trails in the Gateway National Recreation Center near her home.
Karina Vetrano, 30, was found in running trails in the Gateway National Recreation Center near her home.
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DNAinfo/Katie Honan/Instagram

LOWER MANHATTAN — Tips are pouring in to the NYPD after the family of a young woman who was strangled while jogging in Howard Beach launched a GoFundMe page to raise money for a reward to help find her killer.

Karina Vetrano, 30, was found dead Aug. 2 by her father in the marshland area near 161st Avenue and 78th Street after she didn't return home from an evening jog.

The family has since raised more than $250,000 for tips leading to an arrest through the fundraising website.

RELATED: Family Remembers Murdered Jogger as 'Shining Star' at Funeral

"It has accelerated the process," NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said of the GoFundMe campaign at an unrelated press conference in lower Manhattan on Wednesday.

The NYPD originally set up a $2,500 reward, but upped it to $10,000 after investigators had gotten few tips. That bump increased the tip count from three to 30.

Now, Boyce said, of the 70 tips that have since come in to the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline, the department has "about 12 open" for further investigation after "vetting" each one.

The chief said the investigation is currently focused on "trying to figure out where the perpetrator entered and exited the park," and detectives have turned their attention to the western part of the park that abuts East New York in Brooklyn.

"We haven't found any video footage of this perpetrator leaving — or entering for that matter — on the Howard Beach side, so we've done a pivot to the west to see exactly that area of Brooklyn, as opposed to Howard Beach," Boyce said.

He added that detectives are "still in Howard Beach, still taking tips from that area, but that's where we stand right now."

RELATED: 'You Will Pay Forever,' Parents of Murdered Jogger Tell At-Large Killer

Boyce said investigators have found "the physical evidence we're going to get" and he expected they were "not going to get too much more."

He said he has walked the park himself "several times," trying to find where Vetrano's attacker came from.

"You walk to the Belt Parkway and you go west from there, you're right at Hamilton Avenue or at Erskine Street," he described. "So that's where part of our investigation is now, into that area of the 75[th Precinct].

"You'd have to walk," he noted. "You couldn't drive a car — you could ride a bicycle, and there's a parallel bicycle path that runs along the Belt Parkway."

Queens Borough President Melinda Katz recently allocated funding to pay for cameras around the park entrance after locals circulated a petition pushing for more surveillance.

RELATED: Cameras Will Be Installed at Park Where Jogger Was Killed, But Fears Remain

The park is on federal land, which has complicated getting cameras installed in the past, according to Katz. The maintenance of the weedy marshland has prompted community anger toward the National Parks Service.

"That's not a park, that's a dumping ground," one local fumed at a recent community meeting after Vetrano was brutally beaten to death.