(CNN) -- Doug Kirchoff doesn't think chance explains why a bottle full of messages washed up on the shore of Horn Island, Mississippi.
Kirchoff, the supervisor of a crew doing cleanup after the BP oil spill, was astonished by the content of the four letters found inside the bottle last month.
"What we found was it was about a soldier that lost his life in the Afghanistan war and his family had written him a series of letters kind of sharing their thoughts and emotions," Kirchoff said Thursday.
In them, family members wrote letters to their beloved son and brother, Pvt. James Prosser, 21, a Welsh soldier who was killed in 2009, according to the South Wales Argus newspaper.
"Each person when we unwound the letters, started opening one letter at a time and reading one letter at a time," Kirchoff said. "As we found out after about two letters the whole occasion turned real somber and we were kind of taken aback and were like, 'Wow! This is a little more than we anticipated at first'".
In January, Prosser's mother, Sarah Adams, her son, her daughter and the latter's boyfriend dropped the bottle in the Atlantic Ocean at Barbados, 1,300 miles from the Mississippi coast, AOL reported. CNN
