April 29, 1981

13 14 By E. R. SHIPP An engineer at the Metropolitan Opera House testified yesterday that he heard ''a sigh, a moan or a groan'' coming from the bottom floor of the building on the night that Helen Hagnes, a violinist, was murdered last July. But the engineer, James Devlin, who was testifying on the second day of the murder trial of Craig S. Crimmins, said: ''It meant nothing to me at the time - I was startled by the sound.'' Mr. Devlin, an operating engineer who helped maintain the Met's air-conditioning system, was one of several Met employees who testified yesterday about events leading to the discovery of Miss Hagnes's nude, bound and gagged body on a steel ledge in a ventilation shaft. She had disappeared the night before, July 23, during an intermission in a performance by the Berlin Ballet.

Both the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Corporation reported today that they had larger-than-expected losses for the first quarter of this year, and each attributed the results to sluggish sales and rising costs. Ford and Chrysler were the last of the four American auto manufacturers to report first-quarter earnings. With only the largest, the General Motors Corporation, reporting a profit, the companies had a total net loss of nearly $600 million for the quarter, reflecting their continuing difficulties in selling enough cars to finance billions of dollars in retooling costs to produce a new generation of smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles. Despite Chrysler's loss of $298 million in the quarter, the nation's third-largest auto company said that it did not plan to ask the Federal Government for any more loan guarantees to assure its survival. The company said that, even with this loss, its cash reserves had increased and it was following a plan that would return it to profitability by the fourth quarter.

In the long hallway outside Courtroom 928, Dolores Higgins finds solace in her cigarettes, the Blessed Virgin Mary and a manila envelope full of photographs. She smokes and prays, prays and smokes, and sometimes she takes the pictures out and looks them over, as though to convince herself that there was indeed a time when her son sat on Santa Claus's lap, attended first grade and smiled into the camera with his arm around her shoulder. There was a time when Mrs. Higgins's life was almost exemplary in its normalcy, but that was before the steamy day last August when the police charged Craig Crimmins, her middle child, with the murder of Helen Hagnes at the Metropolitan Opera House. Everything changed that day, and as Mrs. Higgins sits on a long wooden bench outside the room where her 22-year-old son is being tried, she holds her photographs as though they were so many pieces of her life, fallen to bits.

Israeli jet fighters shot down two Syrian helicopters over east central Lebanon today in what was officially described as a warning that Israel would not allow the Syrians to defeat the Lebanese Christians in the fighting that has flared in recent weeks. The helicopters were ''attacking and murdering Christians in Lebanon,'' an Israeli military statement said in explaining the Israeli air action, which took place in the Zahle area east of Beirut. (In Damascus, a spokesman of the Syrian military command said the Israeli action ''will not deflect Syria from the course it has charted in Lebanon.'' He said Syria was determined to achieve ''national reconciliation'' in Lebanon.

A sharp decline in imported oil, combined with a surge in American exports, shrank the nation's merchandise trade deficit to $451.4 million in March, the smallest in more than five years, the Commerce Department reported today. Economists said the drop in oil imports - to about 5.5 million barrels a day from February's 7.5 million -probably will not be repeated in future months. But they also said imports were unlikely to soar again in the next few months.